Our Company

Makes Sense Strategies (MSS) is a high-level education publishing and consulting company that features research-into-practice strategies of the well-known educational researcher, Edwin Ellis, Ph.D. MSS publishes software designed for teachers and students as well as books and manuals that address how to implement MSS techniques. MSS Associates are a group of professional developers who work with schools to support implementation of MSS.

Our Mission

The MSS mission is the achievement of all students. This mission is addressed by enabling teachers to use highly robust, research-based, instructional procedures designed to promote:

• Students making sense of complex information without having to water it (or dumb it) down
• High levels of student engagement
• Integration of higher order critical thinking skills
• Understanding big ideas rather than memorizing trivia
• Explicit instruction in cognitive strategies for learning
• Authentic, meaningful, connected learning experiences
• Scaffolded learning experiences
• Differentiated instruction and curriculum
• Brain-based instruction and language learning strategies
• Connections to background knowledge
• Elaborating to learn, and learning to elaborate
• Strategic instruction

Central to implementing the MSS mission is promoting the use of instructional techniques that are highly effective with all students.

MSS Values

MSS places great value on research-based teaching techniques that are not overly complicated to employ, so the euphemism “Keep It Simple” guides our work. MSS Associates value coupling well-designed research-based materials and effective professional development (PDD) in how to apply them with fidelity. However, we believe that providing teachers with good teaching resources without instruction in how to use them is better than denying them the resources because a school could not afford the costs of PD. Thus, we do not mandate PD when MSS material is purchased, but we do strongly recommend it. Clearly, effective PD makes a huge difference in student outcomes.

When providing professional development workshops and technical assistance, MSS Associates employ the same MSS teaching techniques as the ones they are helping teachers learn to use. In other words, MSS Associates are committed to walking-the-talk.

MSS Overview workshops are often provided to acquaint a faculty with the MSS approach and gain their initial commitment, but these are rarely sufficient to change practice in a school in substantial ways. Thus, MSS Associates value working with schools over an extended period of time so that on-going follow-up and support is provided as teachers develop ownership, knowledge, and skills using MSS strategies.

MSS Associates value differentiated instruction, so professional development is differentiated and tailored to the unique needs and environment of the schools within which they are supporting. This allows professional development in MSS to be scaffolded, so that as teachers become more sophisticated in MSS application, PD targets more sophisticated applications.

MSS History

The name, “Makes Sense Strategies,” emerged from teachers who were using the techniques. “This stuff makes so much sense to use” and “These strategies really help student make sense of…” were phrases expressed so many times by teachers that the name emerged and stuck.

MSS is a compilation of much of the research and development of Edwin Ellis, Ph.D. Greatly influenced by Donald Deshler and Jean Schumaker and their work at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning, Ellis collaborated with them and others to develop and validate the Strategies Instruction Model(SIM) which features a learning strategies curriculum coupled with various instructional routines for enhancing content instruction. Ellis invented and research-validated a number of SIM interventions, including the SLANT Class Participation Strategy, The LINCS Vocabulary Strategy, The LINCing Routine, The Clarifying Routine and The Framing Routine.

Work with Anita Archer on developing The Council for Exceptional Children’s Academy for Effective Instruction and research with Mike Pressley on cognitive reading strategies sparked Ellis’ interest in graphic organizers and ways to apply them when teaching reading, writing, vocabulary, math, content-area subjects (i.e., science and social studies), and social/behavior literacy. For example, Ellis began embedding semantic prompts into the graphic organizers. These prompts serve as cues for students to think about a topic in ways that lead to essential understanding, to employ various higher-order critical thinking skills, and to employ various cognitive strategies that research has shown to greatly increase memory of information being studied. Many teachers began to characterize the visual devices as “think-sheets.” Ellis’ work eventually led to the development of SMARTsheets.

SMARTsheets focus on facilitating understanding of what something is about (e.g., What would a really knowledgeable person think is really important to understand about this?”). For example, Ellis identified the most common topics taught in content-area classes (famous person or group, significant event, issue, theory, process, etc.) and developed a series of SMARTsheets for each topic that focus on essential understandings of that topic.

The SMARTsheets also focus on how to be strategic. These tools are designed for enabling students to learn and use powerful cognitive strategies for reading comprehension, process writing, planning projects, conducting investigations, and making oral or written reports.

Ellis' work with SMARTsheets for students eventually led to SMARTsheets for teachers. These are designed to help teachers differentiate curriculum, (or do "backwards planning") and plan units and lessons that feature differentiated instruction and brain-based Instruction. Included are a range of tools to help teacher design meaningful "connected" experiences to help students develop relational understanding of the subjects they are learning. The teacher SMARTsheets are patterned after various education organizations' professional standards (standards for teaching geography, standards for integrating art, music, and dance into content instruction, etc.).

While teaching at the University of Alabama, this work led to Ellis founding the publishing company, Masterminds, LLC in 1997, and publication of several books and manuals about graphic organizers and strategic instruction. In order to make these resources accessible to all of the public school teachers via the Alabama State Improvement Grant, Ellis put his work on CDs, and thus was born the first beta iteration of “Makes Sense Strategies” in 2001.

Theresa Farmer was one of the teachers with whom Ellis conducted research when validating MSS. Her considerable expertise and the many samples of how she and her colleagues throughout Alabama had been applying MSS across all grades (K-12) resulted in her becoming a MSS co-author.

MSS has evolved considerably beyond the realm of traditional graphic organizers. Eventually, it became apparent that MSS represented a lot more, so in 2007, Masterminds, LLC became Makes Sense Strategies, LLC. Likewise, since the original website (www.GraphicOrganizers.com) no longer represented the breadth and depth of MSS, this website was developed.

Largely through word of mouth from teachers who originally purchased personal copies of the Makes Sense Strategies software and/or books, MSS is now extensively used throughout the United States and is rapidly spreading world-wide. Like Alabama, several states have created state-wide MSS professional development initiatives as have many school districts and individual schools.