How many of you think the popularity of RTI will now bring back an over emphasis of phonics. With RTI and specialized phonics instruction you have to remember on average it should only be 10% of your school population. If it is more than that then you have other problems to worry about, that over emphasizing phonics will not cure. Phonics is important don't get me wrong, and often the reason why struggling readers struggle, but you cannot forget the complete reading process.

A problem with some RTI programs is that in some schools the RTI process is done without the regular classroom teacher being involved in much of the process. The classroom teacher is the adult that interacts with the student more than any other and should as a consequence know the student better. If the student's teacher has no input on what is going on in an intervention then the students needs may not be being fully met. Also there would be no collaboration going on between the classroom teacher and the intervention teacher. When no collaboration takes place then there will be very little to no transfer happening between what is being taught in the intervention and what takes place in the classroom.

Teachers often see the students as simply needing extra time for reading to reach grade level. Lost is what is causing the problem. Is it low IQ, motivational, phonics, comprehension or outside environmental problems that is causing the student to not read at grade level? No one can be complacent in the process.

Another problem is the fact that tier 1 interventions are suppose to be taught using sound research based reading instruction in the classroom. Problems arise when teachers provide instruction that is not good enough. Good instruction may be very sporadic. If interventions given to students are not what they need then other problems occur also. The classroom teacher should be willing and needs to be involved with deciding the content of intervention. This causes another problem however. When will be classroom teachers have time. As a classroom teacher for the past 9 years I know this can be hard. You must be provided time to do this.

RTI has been proven to work through good scientifically based research and many studies. This does bring up another concern however. The fact that in most research studies on RTI, the interventions have been given by well trained research personal or teachers that have received training and continue to receive support. These services and support will not always be available as RTI is used more and more. I have been in a school the has received a Reading First grant in Kansas. I was trained in a program very similar to Reading Recovery. I gained my passion for literacy through this program. However staff leave, and Reading First grants are used up and extra support is taken away that comes along with implementing RTI and other scientifically based programs accepted by most research grants using government money. Do the programs continue to work well long-term when the funds to support them fade away? What about when trained staff leave? Are new staff trained properly? RTI has to be funded and supported to work.

As I have talked about before also research shows that students make the most gains when being given interventions from trained reading teacher. How does RTI work when interventions are provided by well trained reading teachers versuses support help and classroom aids. What do you do when your reading teacher is working with as many students as he can, and you still have students who need interventions? How do you prioritize?It takes lots of good planning in advance before setting up a good RTI program.

RTI greatly differs from the resource room placement trend of the 1970’s and the pre-referral interventions of the 1980’s. RTI is suppose to provide early intervention for struggling readers which directly contrasts the old wait as see method taken on by special education. It was always assumed that you needed to wait until 2nd or 3rd grade to identify students with learning disabilities so you do not miss-diagnose a student.

Today there are many early screening tools and reading readiness tests that are widely available and have much better predictive validity rates than what was around in the early 80’s and 70’s. The IQ test use to be seen as the best predictor of student success. The discrepancy model compared student IQ’s with their actual reading scores, seems very unreliable now with all of the new research using phonological awareness, and letter identification assessments. More valid screening tools and methods are being created every day. These tools include oral reading fluency, word identification, nonsense word fluency assessments, and also phoneme segmentation skill assessments.Pre-referral interventions or suggestions of practical things to try before putting students through what was often thought of as unnecessary standardized tests made by a team of educators, including the classroom teacher, are applaudable in their effort but fall short of what is needed.

The ideas of things to try were often based on teacher anecdotal descriptions of the student academic and behavioral observations however. These are often biased descriptions given by teachers fed up with the student’s behavior, not data driven which RTI is. Suggestions that come out of these team meetings are not very scientific and often are designed to help the social structure of your whole classroom, the student’s social standing or identify and correct the students learning struggles.

They are often not based on research that will give the teachers strategies to improve his or her overall ability to teach reading and meet the diverse needs of students in his classroom. So in reality the intervention were not focus on the student’s inability to read but focused on ways for the teacher to help control the child’s behavior. They often do not help to child learn to read in my opinion. So there was a need for RTI and it can work when it is done right.
I want to hear how you do RTI at your school. I know of some schools who have an RTI time built into the school day where all kids who receive interventions do so at the same time and the rest of the kids in the school complete enrichment activities. This can work but research shows that you get the best results from student when they receive interventions from trained professionals, not support staff which often happens when you have a time set up like this. There are compelling reasons to do this type of RTI time also if you have a lot of students who read interventions. If you are at a school that has only 10% of your students who need interventions then it may not be the best use of time or personnel. I ask if you have more than 10-15% of your students receiving then is the teaching in the classrooms not as effective as it need to be? Each school has their own unique situations and it is important to remember that RTI is not a program that has to be followed like so many urban schools hold on to these days. Please send me your comments.

RTI - Response To Intervention

RTI refers to Response to Intervention. This model of intervention came out of Special Education. It was first mentioned in the special education law, Individuals With Disability Education ACT (IDEA). Statistics show that the largest percentage of students in special education are those with learning disabilities. Most students with learning disabilities are struggling readers. As a result RTI is having a major effect in the field of reading.

RTI is an approach to identifying students with learning disabilities that is different from the discrepancy model typically used to place students in special education that uses IQ testing and often leaves many kids who need it without any extra support. RTI is a tier modeled process used with all students to provide early interventions to students at the classroom level and then small groups within and outside of the classroom before suggesting placement or referring students for special education. In the RTI process students are screened on basic literacy skills approximately 3 times a year. Student’s scores are compared against a benchmark score that is typical for students at their grade level broken down by a beginning of the year, middle of the year, and end of the year benchmark score. Most benchmark screenings look at students Oral Reading Fluency rate. Students who fall below the benchmark score in any of the tested areas are placed in tier 1.

Students who have been screened, identified and placed in tier one receive support within the classroom from their classroom teacher typically. Students who are slightly below the benchmark are often just monitored and those well below the benchmark are placed in an at- risk category and provided immediate attention. Now you must understand that schools that adopt the RTI process also should train their teachers through many forms of professional development to be able to step up their reading instruction and provide students with research based reading instruction that has been proven to work. Students who are identified are supposed to have been receiving great instruction at the classroom level from their teacher. The teacher will differentiate instruction for these identified students giving them extra support in the areas identified as weak from the benchmark screenings and anectdotal notes the classroom teacher takes. The progress of students identified is continuously monitored.

If students due not respond to this mostly regular instruction and make improvements, then they are placed in tier 2 of the RTI model. Tier 2 students receive more intensive instruction because they were not responding to the instruction given in tier 1. Tier two instruction often includes support from a wide arrange of adults in the building including support teachers, paraprofessionals, reading teachers and reading specialist. This instruction is done as pull in, pull out or in small groups. These interventions are again monitored. Students who do not respond to tier 2 interventions are then placed in tier 3. Tier 3 students are typically students who have not made progress with very intensive supports and will be looked at for possible placement in special education. In some schools tier 3 students may receive another round of even more intensive pull out instruction from a reading specialist several times a week or everyday of the week before they are recommended for placement in special education. These interventions would be individualized, and it may include more testing to identify the specific cause of the student’s problems.

RTI is meant to keep students who may have mild learning disabilities or simply poor vocabulary, background knowledge, or decoding skills from being placed in special education. They can receive support in other ways and stay in the regular education classroom where research on social learning theories show students need to be if all possible to learn their best. Students who have made progress and reach the grade level benchmark will not receive interventions any longer or placed in a lower tier as needed. The RTI process often includes a team of teachers that should run dually the Student intervention team promoted by special education when pre-referral interventions became all the rage. It may consist of several classroom teachers, reading specialists, and special education teachers that meet and discuss students, deciding on what type of interventions to use and when to place students on the next tier or release them from a tier.

Now does RTI work??? Yes it can and I will go into more detail in my next post. If set up wrong it can fail like many other initiatives before it. Please email me any questions and I will try to address them.

Hello Everyone

Hello out there! I'm just an educator who wants to continue to grow and learn to meet the needs of my students. Hopefully with this blog I can do that and inspire others along the way. It will be a several weeks before I really get this blog going, so check back again. I promise it will get to rolling soon.