Response to Intervention Pyramid of Interventions

 Vision Statement Our vision is education in a culture of excellence.  Mission Statement Our mission is to ensure every student has the opportunity to succeed.

RTI/POI  Not an extra “to do” to add to your load  Easy to add new structures, but not so easy to change culture  RTI is a means of supporting PLC’s 1)What do we want students to learn? 2)How will we know when they’ve learned it? 3)How will we respond when some students don’t learn? 4)How will we respond when some students have already learned?  RTI also deals with student behavior

Discrepancy Model  Wait until students fail  Intervention is perhaps far too late (can’t catch up on the regular course material)

Do We Believe… that all students can learn?  Then we must transform our culture. We cannot see our job as giving students an opportunity to learn….  We must relentlessly and systematically require that they learn.  This means that supports must be ready to be implemented when needed.

Elements of RTI within PLC’s  Collective responsibility by all staff for all students  Access to high-quality core curriculum  True differentiation in the classroom  Universal screening  Constant monitoring – analyses of student work required to evaluate overall curriculum and diagnose individual student needs  Tiers of intervention  Systematic, explicit, and research-based programs

 From  Response to Intervention (RTI) is based upon the assumption that schools cannot wait for struggling students to fall far enough below grade level to “qualify” for help. Instead, schools should develop a systematic, schoolwide process in which struggling students receive targeted, research-based interventions at the first sign of difficulties. These interventions can be provided by special education and/or regular education resources. Yet for a school implementing PLC practices, this approach to helping students at risk should not be a new concept, as this process is identical to a PLC’s “Pyramid of Interventions.”  While RTI and a Pyramid of Interventions (POI) have essentially the same outcome, we would contend that effectively implementing RTI practices is not possible and should not be pursued until a school effectively begins implementing the three “Big Ideas” of a PLC – a focus on learning, a collaborative culture, and a focus on results. These first steps create the foundation needed to more effectively respond when students don’t learn.  To skip these vital steps and move directly into creating a RTI/POI program would be disastrous. How can a school be expected to create powerful interventions if the staff has not built a culture that believes all students can learn, has not identified what they want their students to learn, and has not created a timely assessment system that can accurately identify which students need additional help?  Remember that the fundamental mission of collaborative time in a PLC is to focus on student learning. As a school embraces the idea that RTI and PLC are not two distinct “programs,” but instead ongoing processes that strive toward this same outcome, the more a school will view their collaborative time as “learning time” (not simply “PLC time” or “RTI time”).  In other words, we hope that the lines between RTI and POI continue to “blur” to the point where they are indistinguishable.