The SESC Regional Reach

By Melissa Conlin, SESC Educational Consultant

SESC proudly celebrates Dr. Tyler Saylor, an English teacher at Harlan High School, who received the prestigious Milken Educator Award and an unrestricted $25,000 cash prize during a surprise assembly on October 28. He is the first educator in Harlan Independent School District history to receive the honor.

Dr. Saylor teaches 11th and 12th grade English, combining high expectations with meaningful support to help students think critically, strengthen their writing, and grow in confidence. In 2025, 98% of his students earned proficient or distinguished scores in on-demand writing on the Kentucky Summative Assessment.

“They are the entire reason I show up every day, and seeing their faces react to this moment was the greatest gift of all,” Saylor shared about his students.

His leadership extends beyond the classroom through involvement in GoTeachKY, the Teachers Advisory Council, and the Kentucky Innovative Teacher Cohort. He also developed a scholarship for a Harlan High School senior pursuing a career in education. Often called the “Oscars of Teaching,” the Milken Educator Awards recognize exceptional educators for their accomplishments and potential for continued impact.

Congratulations to Dr. Saylor and Harlan Independent! His dedication reflects the outstanding teaching happening across our region and the lasting difference educators make in students’ lives.

Photos courtesy of the Milken Family Foundation.

By: Lauren McQueary, SESC Educational Consultant

I know what it is like to work with the child who cannot seem to sit still. I know it professionally, after years of working with educators around behavior, engagement, and student support. But I also know it personally because I am raising three little boys. My boys have made me notice things differently. The tapping pencil. The bouncing leg. The rocking chair. The sudden need to sharpen a pencil that was perfectly sharp five minutes ago. The child who has somehow fallen halfway out of the chair while still technically sitting in it.

None of this is unfamiliar to educators. We work with real children in real classrooms, and those classrooms have to function. Children need to learn to listen, wait, follow directions, complete work, and participate without interfering with someone else’s learning. But the longer I work in this field, the more interested I have become in not only what children are doing, but also what might be happening around them when they are most successful.

Schools are environments, and environments influence learning, attention, engagement, and behavior. The length of a lesson, the amount of sitting, opportunities to talk and respond, transitions, structure, access to movement, and opportunities to pause and reset all play a part in what students are able to give us. That does not mean every challenge can be solved by changing the environment. It simply means the environment deserves a place in the conversation. And recess may be one of the best places to start.

Maybe Recess Deserves Another Look

Recess has always occupied an interesting place in the school day. We know children love it. We know they need physical activity. But when schedules get tight, work needs to be finished, or behavior becomes difficult, recess can begin to feel like one of the few flexible pieces of the day. I understand why.

There are not many things teachers can move around. The bus is coming at the same time. Lunch is at the same time. Specials are scheduled. Instructional minutes matter. And when a student has spent the morning talking, wandering, or not completing work, recess can seem like a natural place to recover time or provide a consequence.

But new guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics gives us a reason to look at that familiar practice again. In its 2026 policy statement, the AAP recommends that recess be protected during the school day and not withheld for academic or punitive reasons. More importantly, the guidance explains why. Recess provides a break from concentrated cognitive effort, supports physical activity and social development, and can help students return to instruction more prepared to concentrate and learn.

Imagine you have worked all morning. You sat through a meeting that should have been an email. Your computer froze twice. Someone interrupted you every time you tried to concentrate. By 10:17, you are already thinking about lunch. Then your boss tells you that because you were talking during yesterday’s meeting, you will need to work through lunch. Would you return to your afternoon more focused and productive? Maybe. But I know myself well enough to know that probably would not be my best afternoon.

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By Alicia Whitworth, SESC Educational Consultant

A Question Worth Asking

We invest significant time, resources, and personnel into Tier 2 mathematics intervention. We identify students who are struggling, analyze assessment data, and develop plans to address unfinished learning.

But as school leaders, we need to ask ourselves a challenging question:

Is our Tier 2 mathematics instruction preparing students to be successful in Tier 1, or are we so focused on filling past gaps that students are falling further behind in today's learning?

Consider a student receiving intervention on multiplication facts while their classmates are exploring fractions. Although strengthening multiplication fluency is valuable, what happens when that student returns to Tier 1 without the foundational understanding needed to participate in the current fractions lesson? The student may be making progress in intervention while simultaneously experiencing new gaps in grade-level instruction. This raises an important concern: Are we measuring intervention success by the skills students recover, or by their increased ability to access grade-level mathematics?

Shifting Our Thinking: From Remediation to Preparation

Karen Karp and her colleagues challenge traditional intervention structures in their 2025 book, Proactive Mathematics Interventions, Grades 2–5: Priming for Success Through Engaging Tasks and Purposeful Design. Their work introduces proactive intervention, an approach that shifts the emphasis from continually looking backward at what students have not mastered to intentionally preparing them for the mathematics they are about to encounter. This approach, known as priming, does not suggest that foundational gaps should be ignored. Instead, it encourages educators to identify the most critical prerequisite understandings students need to engage successfully with upcoming grade-level content.

Rather than asking only, "What does this student still need to learn from previous grades?" we begin asking:

"What does this student need to understand now to be successful in the next important Tier 1 mathematics lesson?"

That shift has significant implications for how we design intervention schedules, select resources, and support collaboration between teachers.

HQIR: The Missing Connection?

High-Quality Instructional Resources (HQIR) provide a coherent progression of grade-level mathematics. Yet in many schools, intervention instruction operates from a separate set of materials, skill lists, or programs that may have little connection to what students are learning in their core classroom.

What if our HQIR became the starting point for planning Tier 2 instruction?

Imagine a fourth-grade team preparing to teach fraction equivalence. Instead of automatically assigning intervention students to a predetermined sequence of below-grade-level skills, the Tier 1 and Tier 2 teachers examine the upcoming lessons together. They identify that students will need to understand equal-sized parts, unit fractions, and how visual models represent the same quantity in different ways. Tier 2 instruction can then intentionally strengthen those understandings before students encounter the grade-level lesson. Students enter Tier 1 with relevant mathematical experiences, familiar representations, and greater confidence to engage in the work.

Intervention becomes a bridge to grade-level learning rather than a separate destination.

What Can School Leaders Do?

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