Response to Intervention: A Call for Educational Excellence

If you teach, you have heard of RtI: Response to Intervention, the most recent initiative or call to action on the educational front. Although a succinct acronym, the evolving concept of RtI is all encompassing. Initially, RtI was a practical response to the growing numbers of students placed in special education programs. Why? Prior to the 2004 reauthorization of NCLB, students receiving special education services had to demonstrate their need for specialized instruction by having failed in the classroom. That is not the legal-ease, but essentially that is what was happening. This approach, as antithetical as it seems, resulted in appropriate placement coming too late for some and inappropriate placement for others. Students really needing special services had fallen too far behind to catch up and students who were in need of additional learning support were placed in a program that labeled and limited their actual potential.

Anyway, let’s not dwell on things that were done…let’s talk about how the business of education is going to move forward. A long history of educational research informs teachers and administrators alike about the relationship between success and continuing academic motivation. Student failure undermines confidence and lack of confidence undermines motivation and performance. Surrounding that circumstance is a growing knowledge and skills gap between what struggling students know and can do and what successful students have been able to master. Such a gap only deepens the challenge of what struggling students need to learn.

And therein lay the opportunities of RtI. Instead of waiting for kids to fail, RtI implores us to look for kids flailing in educational waters and throw them a lifeline before the tide carries them out of the educational mainstream and into uncharted seas. RtI asks us to look for warnings of distress among all students and when finding kids who struggle to keep their heads above water, examine not only the student, but also the delivery system that seems to be failing their individual needs.

I will admit that early in my educational career, if most of my students failed a test or performed dismally, I blamed them: they didn’t study; they didn’t try hard enough; they hadn’t learned the prerequisite knowledge that would make them successful—I blamed the teacher that came before me. But none of that matters! If most kids can’t make achievement gains in a given classroom, the problem is not with the students, the problem lays in the teacher’s hands or head or attitude.

For regular education teachers, especially at the middle and high school levels, RtI is a hard pill to swallow. For many secondary educators, there is a tacit expectation that students arrive in our classrooms with a body of background knowledge acquired through their earlier years of schooling; however, the broadening gaps in student knowledge and skills

Technology and Understanding

After developing a conceptual argument through a Foucauldean lens, I sorted the language through Wordle for motifs and themes.

 

Checkout Wordle! This website is an easy way to create a visual representation of words through “clouds.” I tripped over this website while reading Jan Hart’s blog, E-Learning Pick of the Day (check this blog out!). Once I had seen and used Wordle, I couldn’t stop thinking about where its place was in the reality of our classrooms and it seems to me that we can use it to engage students in applying reading comprehension stratagies.

How to do that? The Wordle cloud is concept map of recurring words within a text; recurring words are signals for main ideas. After reading, have students identify main ideas and then sort the text words through Wordle to monitor conclusions. The word cloud can be used before reading, too, as a tool to activate prior knowledge and establish connections. The cloud can even inflence how kids visualize connections as they develop inferences.

The image above is the result of Wordle’s sifting of the words from a recent paper I wrote. The process is simple–you just insert text and Wordle does the rest. I copied and pasted my entire paper into the Wordle service space and Wordle did the rest, sifting through my langauge to arrive at a cloud representation of the ideas. Look at the Wordle and draw some conclusions about my paper and then read through my blog to see if the message I send in paragraph form has any semblance of the graphic you see above.

The Wordle graphic above is a conceptual representation of a theoretical argument regarding the efficacy of RtI: Response to Intervention.  I have spent much time this fall researching Response to Intervention as part of a doctoral class: Moral and Political Foundations of Educational Policy. The goal of the course was to examine the role of social and cultural theory in contemporary education. As a result, I spent hours reading and analyzing how educational theory affects practical application of policy and eventually classroom methodology, especially in how such theory plays out in meeting today’s challenge of the growing achievement gap.

One of the scariest acronyms in public education today is RtI: Response to Intervention. Really, as with anything else, it’s not the acronym that frightens, but the simplicity of nominalizing a complex, permeating educational approach. Cloaked in terminology like “individualized” and “achievement,” RtI aims at conformity and mediocrity in its quest to bring learners into the mainstream of educational thought and expectations.

Although RtI is not new, the method is new to many classroom teachers who have been teaching whole class style for years. The method is theoretically positive but practically, requires retraining and practice for teachers. The positive part of RtI is the benefit it potentially offers for all learners: find a learner’s specific need/s and learning styles and then use that information to build the bridge of understanding and excellence.

 

However, if used merely to meet mandated levels of AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress), RtI becomes just another “and this too shall pass” bandage on a chronically diseased system. To be effective, RtI requires professional development for teachers as they learn to approach whole class instruction with an eye for the particular and individualized. It also demands support for these teachers in terms of time and encouragement as they reshape habituated methods into new “best practices.” In an absence of time and money, i.e. support, the concept of RtI intimidates classroom teachers, building administrators, and educational theorists.