Is this a bad word in your school?Many of us are finding our way through these new rules and can use all the help we can get. Monday I attended the MAESP luncheon and the presentation was about RtI. It was the best presentation I have attended but that could be because of where my school is in this journey.
Where we have been:
2006-2007
- Attended RTI training
- Created Student Improvement Team (SIT)
- Created forms/paperwork
- Set meeting schedule (1st and 3rd Thursday of the month)
2007-2008
- Met regularly
- Started having referrals and meetings about students
- Tweaked paperwork (District-wide forms because forms will stay in perm file to go to next school.)
- Some interventions suggestions worked and some didn’t
- A little teacher frustration, and then a lot of frustration
- Focused on ONE issue at a time and not a laundry list of concerns
- Started to encourage more data-based referrals
2008-2009
- Regular meetings
- Meetings more organized and faster paced (see flipchart below – This flipchart is what we use for our agenda to keep on time and on track.)
- Must bring only ONE issue that is backed by data to refer a student
- Our district still uses the descrepency model and some 3rd graders need to be “tested” because they have had every intervention our school offers and are still not making progress.
Where we are headed:
We still need to tweak our system.
- We need a master list of interventions.
- We need to choose specific interventions for fluency, comprehension, addition, multiplication, problem solving etc.
- Need for more common assessments and more often to provide the data on student success
RTI Podcast to come at a later date!
We are starting to talk RTI. What we have in place so far is that we do have an intervention team in place and referral papers for the intervention team. Here is a link to the forms online if they are helpful to anyone: http://kirbyville.k12.mo.us/specialservices/Kirbyville_%20ITR_%20Form.doc
We have interventions suggested on our webpage: http://kirbyville.k12.mo.us/curriculum/interventions.htm
And we have a teacher resource page as a part of our special services page: http://kirbyville.k12.mo.us/specialservices/special_ed5.htm
We are using NWEA as our universal screening for grades 2-8, but we still need to select something for K/1. NWEA does have a computerized program for those grades, but it is very expensive and I haven’t heard too much positive about it. I have been looking at a program called ESGI, where you can even construct your own tests. It has to be individually administered and it is in a “yes”/ “no” format. http://www.esgisoftware.com is the site. Has anyone used this? What’s your opinion?
We also need to put in an intervention time in our schedule. We have Title 1, so we provide support for reading, but there is other instruction going on in class when the students are pulled out, so this needs to be tweaked. We wrote guidelines this year to make the program more fluid with specific criteria for moving to “monitoring” at each grade.
Next year we are going to start PLCs and concentrate on getting started and the first two questions (What do we want students to know? and How will we know when they do?) and concentrate on making sure our first tier, core instruction, is sound. We are going to identify the essential standards, divide the essential standards into the first three quarters, construct benchmark assessments for the first three quarters of the year. After the first year we will move forward with scheduling changes, setting an intervention period and focusing on quality second tier instruction. We will also do some training for our faculty about RTI.
We still use the discrepancy model for identifying students who have SLD.
Thank you so much Addie! I just downloaded your form and love it. I will try to upload our forms as well in case they are helpful to anyone. There is so much more to our RTI story but I just don’t have enough time to make long posts.