Response to Intervention

RtI Reaction/Reflection Assignment

After spending the past school year studying RTI Strategies for Secondary Teachers by Susan Gingras Fitzell, I have developed a sense of understanding of differentiated learning and teaching using strategies that best fit the needs of the student as an individual not as a class of all students. From the first day of learning this statement holds true about response to intervention at being a way of “responding to the struggling learner with academic interventions that match the student’s needs” (Fitzell, 1). Throughout this school year many concepts have become an insight for me. Some of the most meaningful concepts for me were the differentiation needed in the tier one classroom, different grouping strategies, and the math interventions.
Differentiation in the classroom is a tricky thing for a teacher to try to implement in a way that is beneficial for the student learning and effective in the use of time and energy by all. On page 5, Fitzell states that the lack of differentiation in the secondary classroom is “that students who move on to college, whether to engineering coursework or a technical school, primarily know only one mode of studying.” This is an issue for all high school teachers to consider to make sure that there are a variety of learning styles being addressed during the learning process in order to make sure that students are prepared to study for a variety of different academic environments in the future. I have tried to differentiate in my classroom by allowing choices on assessments and centers of different study about the same topic or possibly even different topics.
Flexible grouping is an important part of a successful response to intervention program. Understanding when a student is needing tier one, tier two, or tier three intervention is important in making sure that the grouping you do in your classroom allows for the most educational environment possible. Flexible grouping is the key to being able to contain all learning within the high school classroom with minimal extra time needed outside of the classroom for those students in tier two or tier three. These more intensive interventions can be done during the regular classroom as long as a quality differentiated environment is established for other learners to pursue their learning on their own while the teacher directs more intensive instruction or interventions with students at tier two and tier three.
Some specific interventions I can walk away with and use in my classroom are exit tickets or exit cards, vocabulary word map and extension activity center. I have used exit tickets or exit cards several times in my classroom this school year as a way to check formatively on the learning for that day, but also to allow me to group students when needed based on their current needs and the topics at hand. The vocabulary word map is a way to really develop a true meaning about a vocabulary word or phrase by knowing examples, non-examples, putting it into words and even putting it into a picture or some other type of visual. Math vocabulary is very difficult sometimes and I have seen how using this vocabulary word map on certain very important terms in the classroom has helped in the learning and understanding of vocabulary for all levels of learners. The extension activity center is used when there are students who are ready to move on or don’t need any intervention but classtime needs to be used for those interventions. I have tried to develop a couple of extension activities based on the topics/concepts we were learning, but I need to do more of these and have them ready for anytime.
Perhaps one of the most interesting things to take away from this learning is how much I reflected on our scheduling at the high school and how we could make an intervention class period work or not. It will take a lot of flexibility and planning, but I believe that the idea of implementing an intervention class period or time frame during the school day is very important and could be extremely beneficial to students. The problem could possibly be that one student may need multiple interventions in multiple content areas and how does that look in a flexible atmosphere for that student so that he/she does not get overwhelmed and still feels that the time is beneficial and a good use of his/her time? It could be that on certain days of the week certain content areas work on intervention with students and then more specific and intense intervention can be implemented when needed on other days when a student doesn’t need to work in other content areas.
In order to make sure that we use this intervention time to the highest quality possible, we will need to implement some sort of quality universal screener and develop great progress monitoring assessments to readily plan for those students that will need intervention for upcoming concepts. I think these are both huge hurdles that will take a lot of work and a lot of planning, but if we put our minds to it, I believe that it could be possible for the success of our future students.