Sunday, September 12, 2010
Is RTI part of Middle Level Education?
Through this week's readings I was surprised that I saw very little mention to RTI and data driven instruction. Our school has done a lot of work with RTI including implementing SKILLS Blocks for Grades 5-8 in Math and 5-6 for Language Arts. One of the focuses of MAMLE this year is also RTI. What are other schools doing in regards to RTI? With all the assessments that our students suffer through anyways, what should we be using as an initial screener? Our district uses the NWEA's, but there has been question if we get the most accurate results using this data. The way that our school (and several other middle schools who we have communicated with in regard to Skills Block) group students for skills block based on some type of score, thus homogeneously grouping our students for these intensive skills revision and practice sessions. Does this mean that our way of teaching it the first time was ineffective or does it just further prove that our students are held to unattainable standards? Schools are taking a lot of time and effort to implement different RTI programs, but is it just a fad though? You have to think that schools and teachers all want the best for students and will work with all students so they succeed.
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I was just drawn to this blog as our school is also heavily involved in the whole RTI thing. The way I understand it from our special ed. administrative team is that RTI is really a state (or national, something) mandate. It's a way to prevent kids from automatic referral to special ed. services and instead, looks to identify kids who need "something more" and tries to give them that "more" to see if it solves any problems. If, after a given period of time, the student is still far behind his/her peers, (at our school we use a variety of data including teacher recommendation to refer kids and RTI staff use specific testing tools to further identify specific needs)then the referral process to special ed. will proceed. RTI, therefore, is not only used for academics but also for students identified with social-emotional needs. I think it is really interesting though because it seems like every school/district has DRASTICALLY different ways of interpreting and implementing RTI. It makes me wonder if maybe I am wrong and our district is just being over the top due to litigation that has been eating up resources in our special ed. department for the last few years. Things that make you go hmmmm . . .
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