Friday, May 9, 2014

Reflections on RtI

We spent a major part of our year studying RtI at my school, and we were asked to do a reflection.  I am sharing part of my reflection for my post today.

Identify next steps needed in your district or school to prepare for use of this approach.
                There are two things I would like to see done to help facilitate effective RtI at the high school.  One of them is a real effort to identify root causes.  As was emphasized in the webinars, when students are not being successful it is important to identify the root causes so that we can try to address those rather than the side effects of the root causes.  This can be a very challenging task, and likely we will not succeed every time.
                Currently I feel as though we often address behavior issues with academic interventions.  These attempts to intervene do not get at the root cause and therefore do not actually help solve the problem.  So even though it will be challenging to identify the root causes, and even more challenging to provide interventions, it gives more hope of success than what we currently have in place.
                The other thing I would like to see happen in order to facilitate effective RtI at the high school is implementing an enrichment/intervention period during our day.  I can see many ways of making this work, but all of them would be a challenge to set up and implement.  All staff would need to be involved to make it successful and all would need to be committed to making it valuable for students.  The enrichment opportunities would have to be things that students would be interested and willing to dig in to that are more than and outside of what they get in the classroom.  The intervention classes would have to be additional instruction for the students, not study hall.

                I believe implementation of these two things could have a drastic effect on the success of many students at our school.  They would both take a lot of work, but they would show that our focus is on the students and creating a system that supports them as learners.

What changes would you make if you could to help implement appropriate response to intervention?

-Kathryn

#MTBoS30
12/30

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