When I first started hearing the RTI (Response to Intervention) drumbeat I didn’t think much of it. My district is quick to adopt the latest education silver bullet to solve all that ails us. Even after reading Rena’s Post, I figured it would come and go like so many other “models”, “plans”, “curriculums” with little impact on my day to day life as an English Language Development teacher. Well I have been hit by the RTI bus. Hard.
As implemented in my building, RTI stipulates that “intervention specialists’ (Special Ed, Literacy & Numeracy Coaches, Reading Recovery, ELD) can only work with served students during “non-instructional time”. Obviously we also can’t work with them during Library, PE, Art, Music, Lunch or Recess. So certain “sacred” windows of time have been identified by grade level during which I can work with English Language Learners. Which works out fine…on paper. But then a teacher changes their schedule and is suddenly doing direct instruction. Or one member of the grade level team has their day scheduled completely opposite that of their other team members. Or it is Art and Band day which blows my “windows” right out the door.
This has been far more of a nightmare for Special Ed as they attempt to comply with required IEP minutes. But a program that is apparently designed to provide more intentional instruction to struggling students is making it exceptionally hard for me to work with said students.
What is happening other places? How is RTI impacting your instruction and how are you making it work?
This is really fascinating to me as a special educator! RTI as a concept is about a continuum of support, and at the classroom level, that means weaving appropriate instructional supports into regular instruction (saving time and work, not creating more).
What you all have described is not what RTI is supposed to look like, at all. No wonder it seems to be failing and teachers are frustrated.What Tracey is describing leaves the RESPONSE out of response to intervention. A child has a need, you implement an intervention, collect data, and analyze the response. Based on that data, you continue what you are doing, or increase the level of intervention and repeat.
I’m curious if you’ve gotten any professional development on differentiation strategies for particular deficits, etc.? It sounds as though instead of coming together to strategize how to implement instructional strategies and effective data collection/analysis into already existing curriculum and routines, you all are experiencing RTI as a laundry list of groups, curriculum, and activities.
Oh, RTI. I am writing this with a huge sigh, followed by head shaking, from side to side. We’re in our second year of RTI. Last year was awful. All students did RTI, whether they were at benchmark or not. We organized among our grade level team teachers, special ed teachers, math and reading specialists, and some paras to regroup students from the same grade level for half an hour, twice a day, four days a week. We taught from newly purchased curricula, of which we had to teach exactly as was prescribed, because we were accountable to the district for the purchase. Some students did computerized math programs independently. Group sizes were relatively small for the very low students. But, the curriculum didn’t necessarily match their needs. They were scripted, and intellectually insulting. The reading curriculum focused only on fluency skills, not comprehension, the area our students needed the most attention. One hour of instruction taken out of our day meant very little else was taught. RTI, of course, couldn’t take place during the core reading and math instruction. (It is probably the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, and sent me to DC to participate in the Save Our Schools march. )
This year is a bit better – for reading instruction. It’s happening during the reading block, and it’s in a guided reading format. The teachers choose the leveled book for their group. (We “F and P’ed” everyone in the school, and will do it three times every year now.) We teach both fluency and comprehension, and the teacher makes “professional” decisions regarding what should be learned. It adds more work for us, however, because we’ve got everyone leading these guided reading groups – everyone including adults who are not teachers. So, teachers have to write 8 extra lesson plans each week for the two classified staff members who come to their class 4 days a week to help implement this. Some of the group sizes are large – with 12 students. I don’t think guided reading was intended for 12 students. These teachers and paras are running into challenges.
For math, we’ve extended the RTI session to 45 minutes, up from 30 minutes last year. Students are pulled to work one on one with the teacher, or in small groups. We have a math specialist there to help out. The rest of the students are doing a computerized math program independently, or working independently on something the teacher has given them.
This year, I’m not teaching math or reading, so our RTI schedule isn’t affecting me. (Whew! Another sigh.) The math teacher complains about how much time it’s taking out of her core instruction. She’s fallen so far behind with the pacing guide, that she’s made the executive decision to cut it back down to 30 minutes until she catches up. She hasn’t shared that decision with the principal.
After all that work last year, our MSP test scores tanked. I’m not all that surprised. When you take away the autonomy of teachers, and their ability to make professional decisions regarding their work in meeting the needs of their students, what direction can the test scores go?
Our RTI is primarily focused on academic achievement (read lack thereof). It is all about moving the kids on the “bubble”-you know all the kids who are 2s on MSP. It’s focusing the energy on the 15-20% who need additional acadmeic support and in some cases additional social/emotional support. What chaps me is that this 15-20% is driving how and when instruction is delivered in such a way that I have difficulty seeing how it will benefit those we are aiming to serve.
We don’t have RTI yet, but we his brother, MTI. It’s time and labor intensive. And like Rob said, most of the data we generate could have come far more easily (and cheaply) by simply talking to the people who know the kids.
RTI popped and fizzled at our school. I believe it was implemented for behavior support rather than academic support. It was something we implemented for a couple of years. A few staff meetings were devoted to gathering data and new office referral forms. These forms were fed into the SWIS data system. Apparently somebody could look at the frequency of referrals as complied by the SWIS system and figure out that there were a lot of problems at the second lunch recess. Or, they could have asked the recess supervisor, the office manager, the nurse, or the students and they would have told you there were many problems at the second lunch recess.
All tiers. All at once. All the time.
From the message my building has been getting from the powers that be, this implementation as described is district wide. But I can’t help but think other buildings must be doing a slower roll out. Because in meetings with other elementary ELD teachers they don’t seem to be experiencing the same level of scheduling impact. But then not all of them are in Title schools and most do far more push-in service whereas I focus on more sheltered pull out instruction.
Given what I learned this weekend about the upcoming implementation of Teacher/Principal Evaluation and Common Core Standards I think I may have seen the writing on the wall as to what will replace RTI….hopefully we can give that the time effective implementation will require.
Is your building implementing all of RTI all at once? All tiers of intervention? If so, that worries me. My understanding is that broader forms of in-instruction interventions are to be in place before moving on to the kind of pull-out instruction it seems you’re describing.
The fact that you used being hit by a bus as the metaphor makes me think that RTI is soon to fall victim to the impulses of too many policymakers and administrators: it’s new, it worked somewhere, we need it now! In reality, my understanding of RTI is that is might be a three, four, or five year gradual roll out in order to become institutional and therefore have a snowball’s chance of sticking and making a difference.
Every fad that has come and gone (and come back again) in education, PROBABLY would have worked perfectly had the implementation been gradual, flexible, and responsive rather than under some contrived pressure to achieve within the first fifteen minutes of the unveiling of the new acronym. Unfortunately, we never give ourselves enough time (or money) to slow down and think about all these confounding factors like the ones you describe above–BEFORE implementation. Instead, we hear “new acronym: go!” And by “we” I mean the people who make decisions in an office several miles away from the nearest classroomful of kids.
Don’t worry, RTI will be replaced by something new in a couple of years, before all the hard work teachers will do in response to RTI will be given time to come to maturity.