The Iowa Reading Research Center is excited to announce the release of a new, no-cost, fidelity monitoring tool for Iowa educators.
School administrators, instructional coaches, and others can visit the MOTR-Cycle webpage to access the tool.
MOTR-Cycle (Measuring Opportunities to Respond—Cycle of Coaching and Feedback) is an online tool that instructional coaches and administrators can use to track opportunities to respond during classroom observation. Opportunities to respond, or “OTRs” are a key component of engaging, interactive, and explicit literacy instruction. Monitoring OTRs during lesson delivery can support instructional coaches and administrators in providing effective coaching and in accurately assessing intervention fidelity and success.
“A key part of interactive and engaging literacy instruction is providing students with multiple opportunities and ways to respond to what they are learning—otherwise known as OTRs.”
As explained by IRRC Director Shawn Datchuk in our recent blog post, there are four key questions to consider when monitoring OTRs in intervention delivery: question format, number of students expected to respond, response modality, and the pace of responses. The MOTR-Cycle app will aid instructional coaches in tracking these final two data points more efficiently and accurately.
The launch of MOTR-Cycle is a part of the IRRC’s Measure FIRST initiative, a project that aims to support Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) teams engaged in data-based decision-making by providing tools and guidance for measuring fidelity of instruction or intervention. For now, the MOTR-Cycle app is exclusively designed to track the pace of OTRs in intervention delivery. However, the app will eventually be expanded to measure other fidelity metrics as well.
As described by IRRC Assistant Research Scientist Keller Young, “We hope to provide school personnel with a fidelity monitoring tool that is customizable to schools’ individual literacy needs.”
The ultimate goal of the Measure FIRST initiative is to develop a tool that facilitates the creation of individualized fidelity protocols, allowing coaches and administrators to more easily take detailed, specific notes during classroom observation. Data from these observations can then be used to support collaborative conversations between teachers and observers and inform instructional decision-making. The full version of the app is scheduled for release later this summer.
To learn more about the importance of measuring OTRs and fidelity monitoring on the whole, see our previous blog posts “Fidelity in School Settings: How It Works and Why It Matters” and “Measuring Opportunities to Respond: A MOTR of Highly Interactive Literacy Instruction,” and keep an eye out for our upcoming Measure First eLearning module.
