School improvement does not take a summer break when the district has entered the ominous failure to make AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) designation. So on my way out the door on June 19th, when I checked my school mailbox one last time, I was not surprised to find that I had received a little reading assignment for the summer: Oh boy! A book on RTI (Response to Intervention) and we all know that intervention has got to take place to get our students on track to make it through state testing. (WASL may be out the door, but the new tests will still hold our students and our teachers accountable for meeting standards.)
I don’t have a problem with accountability, but I do have natural suspicions about these acronyms that suddenly appear as the next great answer to all of the “problems” with the educational system. So with the book in hand I did some research into the shiny bright “new” RTI movement.
Here’s what I found out: RTI is not new—folks have been working with this concept since at least 1999. There are several resources available for information about RTI but one of the best I found was from the National Association of State Directors of Special Education. I was interested in how RTI might be implemented in our building and this site actually provided a free download on implementation for districts as well as for buildings. Here is a little preview—implementation of RTI in practice typically proceeds through three stages:
- Consensus building – where RTI concepts are communicated broadly to implementers and the foundational “whys” are taught, discussed and embraced.
- Infrastructure building – where sites examine their implementations against the critical components of RTI, find aspects that are being implemented well and gaps that need to be addressed. Infrastructure building centers around closing these practice gaps.
- Implementation – where the structures and supports are put in place to support, stabilize and institutionalize RTI practices into a new “business as usual.”
I also learned that RTI is a tiered approach directly related to actual student achievement as measured in the classroom—it doesn’t wait for a state mandated test and it doesn’t wait for a student to completely fail (Ed’s Note: I did not know this. Awesome!). The teacher uses high quality instruction and frequently assesses the learning. If a student is not making progress it shows up right away and the teacher can adjust the instruction on an individual basis thus moving the student into the next tier of intervention. This is based directly on student need so that differentiated instruction can be implemented quickly and in time to get a student tuned in before they get tuned out!
I am now reading the book—RTI From All Sides; What Every Teacher Needs To Know, Mary Howard, 2009—with an open mind and a hopeful spirit. If we can turn students around before they learn to give up, then the dream of educating all the children can actually come to fruition. Summer is the perfect time for school improvement—because learning begins with educating me: the classroom teacher.
Pamelia Valentine is a guest blogger and teacher in the Shelton School District.
Previous Blogs:
School Improvement—Mission Statement Complete
School Improvement—Mission [Statement] Impossible?
School Improvement—The Vision is just the Beginning