Through data collection, intervention, assessment of progress and revised practice, the RTI team is able to make recommendations for continued intervention, accommodations, and services that will decrease academic and behavioral challenges and improve student success. Schools without RTI systems may not have sufficiently assessed why student performance is stagnant or declining, which is a disservice to students and denies schools an opportunity to improve their practice.
There are many factors that impact growth, and it is the job of RTI leaders to assess student needs and build solutions in collaboration with parents, teachers, and support staff.
Additionally, it is the responsibility of schools to provide equitable and adequate academic and behavioral support, which can be ensured through a sufficient RTI program. Unidentified focus and attention challenges, for example, are much harder to address when students progress to middle school, as opposed to when they are in early elementary.
The Response to Intervention process uses screeners to clarify which students may be in need of academic and behavior support. RTI teams can determine student need by deeply assessing student data in systems that already exist. For example, assessing daily behavioral trends, chronic absenteeism, suspension data, retention data, standard school benchmark test scores, and daily objective mastery can tell RTI leaders a lot about students before diving into deeper assessments.
When students struggle to learn, it can cause their behavior to decline. Showing a lack of success in class may impact student confidence and motivation. Students who are in need of intervention may have a hard time keeping up with their peers which can cause them to act out or give up easier.
Read more about instructional interventions. Another essential component of RTI is called progress monitoring.
During an intervention, a teacher or other member of the RTI team uses an assessment tool that measures certain skills. They assess the skills every week or every other week. That may sound like a lot of testing. But each assessment only takes a few minutes to complete. Learn more about progress monitoring. Think of this tiered system as a pyramid, with the intensity of support increasing from one level to the next:. Get deeper information about the three tiers of support.
But it can help general education teachers pick up on early signs that kids are struggling. It also plays a key role in helping schools figure out who qualifies for special education. If a student qualifies for special education, the RTI interventions used can help the school decide which services and supports to include in the IEP. There are a few other key things to keep in mind about the relationship between RTI and special education:. That kind of modification may be used for some special education students, but not for general education students.
They have the right to ask for an evaluation at any time. As part of the evaluation, the school can gather information from the RTI process, like screening and progress monitoring data. But they still have to follow the time frame of completing an initial evaluation within 60 days of getting parent consent.
Learn about evaluations for special education. RTI is effective for lots of reasons. For one, it can help more kids thrive in general education classrooms. It can also help schools save special education resources for kids who truly need them. Table of contents Preface. About the authors. Learn More. Book details. Product No. ISBN This has led them to implement some of the right practices for the wrong reasons. The questions an organization tries to answer guide and shape that organization's thinking.
Unfortunately, far too many schools and districts are asking the wrong questions, like these. Although high-stakes testing is an undeniable reality in public education, this is a fatally flawed initial question that can lead to incorrect thinking.
For example, many districts that focus first on raising test scores have concluded that they need strictly enforced pacing guides for each course to ensure that teachers are teaching all required state standards before the high-stakes state tests. Usually, these guides determine exactly how many days each teacher has to teach a specific standard.
Such thinking makes total sense if the goal is to teach all the material before the state assessments, but it makes no sense if the goal is to have all students learn essential standards. This in itself is problematic because, as Marzano notes, "The sheer number of standards is the biggest impediment to implementing standards" p.
Assigning arbitrary, pre-determined amounts of time to specific learning outcomes guarantees that students who need additional time to learn will be left in the wake as the teacher races to cover the material.
This faulty thinking also leads to misguided intervention decisions, such as focusing school resources primarily on the "bubble kids" who are slightly below proficient. Administrators who adopt this policy conclude that if these students can improve, the school's test scores will likely make a substantial short-term jump. Consequently, the students far below basic often receive less help. This is deemed acceptable, as the primary goal of the school is to make adequate yearly progress, and the lowest learners are so far behind that providing them intensive resources will likely not bring about immediate gains in the school's state assessment rankings.
Frequently, we have worked with schools that view RTI as a mandated program that they must "implement. Like obedient soldiers, site educators take their RTI marching orders and begin to complete the items on their RTI to-do list, such as administering a universal screening assessment, regrouping students in tiered groups, or creating a tutorial period.
Such an approach is fraught with pitfalls. First, it tends to reduce RTI to single actions to accomplish, instead of ongoing processes to improve teaching and learning. In addition, this approach fails to understand that what we ask educators to "do" in RTI are not ends in themselves, but means to an end.
In other words, a school's goal should not be to administer a universal screening assessment in reading but to ensure that all students are able to read proficiently. To achieve this goal, it would be essential to start by measuring each student's current reading level, thus providing vital information to identify at-risk students and differentiate initial instruction.
This concern is understandable, as special education is by far the most litigated element of public education, and the potential costs of being out of compliance or losing a fair hearing can cripple a district. Unfortunately, a large number of schools and districts are making RTI unreasonably burdensome.
We find many districts creating unnecessarily complicated, laborious documentation processes for every level of student intervention, in fear that the data may be needed someday if a specific student requires special education services. Teachers tell us that they often decide against recommending students for interventions "because it's not worth the paperwork.
We have also worked with districts that refuse to begin implementing RTI until there is a greater depth of legal interpretation and case precedent; all the while, their traditional special education services are achieving woefully insufficient results in student learning.
If there is one thing that traditional special education has taught us, it's that staying compliant does not necessarily lead to improved student learning—in fact, the opposite is more often the case. Since the creation of special education in , we have spent billions of dollars and millions of hours on special education—making sure we meet time lines, fill out the correct forms, check the correct boxes, and secure the proper signatures.
A vast majority of schools are compliant, but are students learning? In the United States, the special education redesignation rate the rate at which students have exited special education and returned to general education is only 4 percent U.
Department of Education, According to the U. It is estimated that up to 50 percent of the U. There is little evidence to suggest that greater levels of legal compliance lead to greater levels of learning. If schools or districts would like to stay legal, they should start by focusing on student learning; parents rarely file for a fair hearing because their child is learning too much.
At most schools, when a student struggles in the regular education program, the school's first systematic response is to refer the student for special education testing. Traditionally, schools have believed that "failure to succeed in a general education program meant the student must, therefore, have a disability" Prasse, Rarely does special education testing assess the effectiveness and quality of the teaching that the student has received.
RTI is built on a polar opposite approach: When a student struggles, we assume that we are not teaching him or her correctly; as a result, we turn our attention to finding better ways to meet the student's specific learning needs. Unless schools are able to move beyond this flawed question, it is unlikely that they will ever see RTI as anything more than a new way to identify students for special education. Schools cannot succeed by doing the right things for the wrong reasons.
So what are the right questions that should lead our work? Our schools were not built so educators would have a place to work each day, nor do they exist so that our government officials have locations to administer high-stakes standardized tests each spring.
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