MTSS, Multi Tiered System of Supports,  encompasses several approaches, one of which is Response to Intervention (RTI). Here are a few strategies for classroom implementation at the secondary level.

1. Tier One of RTI requires the use of best practice, research-based teaching methods. Research-based strategies implemented in the differentiated classroom reduce the need for interventions.

2. Using frequent progress monitoring, teachers determine where a student is lacking and then seek Tier Two interventions that might be appropriate for that student. Often, Tier Two interventions can be researched-based practices used in Tier One, but with three modifications:

• Specific students receive more intense instruction and application of strategies.
• Students are given more time to practice and implement the strategies.
• The intensity of implementation may increase.

3. Having adequate time to implement interventions is often the greatest challenge faced at the secondary level. When teachers routinely implement small group work, flexible grouping, or center teaching, interventions in Tier Two fall right into place in the general educator’s lesson plan.

4. Rather than forcing teachers to follow a script from a published program, teachers are encouraged to use their professional skills, experience, and an understanding of student needs and data derived from frequent progress monitoring to determine appropriate interventions. The key is using a problem-solving model to hone in on possible interventions.

5. An option for delivering Tier Two instruction that works well for students at the secondary level is a tutored study hall combined with in-class, frequent, immediate interventions made possible by Chunking Lesson Plans^®.

6. Tier Three is not as delineated as Tiers One and Two in literature on Response to Intervention. School districts define Tier Three requirements as follows:

• Interventions are more intensive, based on problem-solving models, and implemented through a combination of means including classroom instruction, outside-of-school instruction, or in-school instruction outside of the general classroom.
• A combination of intensive interventions implemented in general education as part of a wrap-around approach to meeting a student’s needs.
• Some school districts, as well as books on the topic of RTI, consider special education to be part of Tier Three.

7. How we assess students to determine their understanding of content is critical to the Response to Intervention process. Keep it simple, frequent, and efficient. Authentic assessments incorporate a variety of measures into the evaluation process and focus on formative assessment. Types of authentic assessment include rubrics, exit cards, curriculum-based measurement, student self-evaluation, and documented observations.

Originally published and copyright© 2012. Excerpted from RTI Strategies for Secondary Teachers by Susan Fitzell, Corwin Press ©2011. www.responsetointernventiononline.com

For more information on differentiation and Response to Intervention, see Susan Fitzell’s book, RTI Strategies for Secondary Teachers.

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Featured seminar – Response to Intervention (RTI) Strategies

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A technology solution for auditory learners who need material read aloud

As a special education teacher, I always struggled with having to read tests aloud to multiple students at the same time. I would have some students who would be ahead of me, some behind, and sometimes we wouldn’t even get the test done in a single class period.

A few years ago, one of the general educaton teachers I collaborate with and I were talking and they suggested that I try recording the tests for class. I went through a quick training on using Camtasia and my life has never been better on test days!!

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Students can listen, and pause, at their own pace.

The nice thing is if I am not at school my sub does not have to worry about running the program. I can monitor the program from wherever I am to be sure it is working properly and to track student progress.

The feedback I have received from my students has been well worth the time it takes to record and upload the tests. They like the fact that they can test at their own speed and they can pause, rewind, fast forward and that I am (usually) available in the room if they have questions.

Right now I am one of the few who use this program. I have gotten a few English teachers to try it and the health teacher used it last year. For my US History classes it has been great!

Use this strategy to support auditory learners at any level

Susan’s notes: Thanks so much to Jessica for sharing this great idea with us! While she is using it only in her U.S. History class, at present, this is a great idea for any subject area. The best part about this strategy is that it can be adapted to support auditory learners in any grade, whether they need this kind of intervention, or not. Even better is the fact that this tool is FREE to individual teachers and quite affordable for most districts!

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Featured seminar
Using iPads® and Other Cutting-Edge Technology to Strengthen Your Instruction

Apps, Websites, and Other Cutting-Edge Tools to Strengthen Instruction with Technology Get this Book Now! Valuable tips for finding, downloading and using the latest and best apps to compliment your curriculum! Get Susan Fitzell’s book now. Don’t waste any time Using iPads and Other Cutting Edge Technology to Strengthen Your Instruction Bring Susan to your campus! Featured seminar – Using iPads® and Other Cutting-Edge Technology to Strengthen Your Instruction

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Teaching Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Excellent article on Teaching Students with Autism. Would love to know your thoughts on the article. Also, feel free to share your best tips for Teaching Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

http://teaching.monster.com/benefits/articles/8761-22-tips-for-teaching-students-with-autism-spectrum-disorders

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Program Description:Program Description:
“What Should I See When I Walk-through an Inclusive, Differentiated Classroom?” is a question often asked as schools move toward differentiated and inclusive classrooms. Administrators have a key role in ensuring that students’ learning needs are met. In this dynamic, practical session, you will learn what best-practice, researched based strategies and methods might be used to engage all learners so that students improve test scores and reach their potential.

Session Outline:
Upon successful completion of the program, participants will be able to:

• Determine what should be observed during a walk-through or observation of an inclusive and/or differentiated classroom.
• Understand how teachers might implement successful strategies and techniques for differentiating curricula to meet IEP requirements for students with special needs. Minimal theory and maximum practical, easily implemented strategies and techniques will be covered in this program.
• Learn best-practice, researched based strategies that maximize ALL student performance. Identify key steps that teachers might implement to help students with special needs, students at-risk, gifted students, and the average learner to be successful.
• Apply practical strategies that make instruction work. Identify and learn how to implement strategies and approaches in the regular classroom that encourage the success of students with special needs without watering down the curriculum.
• Understand which activities increase retention and success on tests and Quizzes. These activities are quickly and easily prepared, encourage student cooperation and peer support. They are simple and effective strategies to increase student success.
• Promote success for ALL students. Through concrete examples, learn to identify teaching methods and techniques that increase learning for ALL students.

Instructional strategies I will employ:
Dynamic lecture (never boring), think/pair/share, movement strategies, and interactive discussion techniques are utilized during the presentation. Administrators walk away with modelled strategies that they can actually use.

For Thousands Of Tips To Teach… So Your Students Are Top Performers Get this Book Now!   Gain more knowledge on differentiation strategies to reach ALL learners Get Susan Fitzell’s book Now. Don’t waste any time Special Needs in the General Classroom, Strategies That Make It Work. Available in both print and electronic versions! Want quality professional development you can afford? Save time with this popular PD option: A Professional Development Kit, for all teachers, with a Graduate Credit Option! Bring Susan to your campus! Featured seminar – Differentiation Strategies to Reach ALL Learners in the Inclusive Classroom

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Response to Intervention Seminars, Workshops, and Conference Sessions

Response to Intervention Strategies for Secondary Teachers

Response to Intervention (RTI) is an exciting differentiation model that schools and districts may opt to use as a new way of meeting students’ needs earlier and more quickly. This seminar is designed to show you how RTI can be implemented effectively and efficiently at all grade levels.

This seminar will help alleviate the fear and confusion surrounding RTI, especially at the secondary level, by providing practical, classroom-tested techniques for Tiers I, II and III as well as user-friendly materials that can be implemented immediately in your classroom. You will receive many simple, straight forward, and effective strategies, best practices, and classroom-proven tips to enhance the success of all your students including students with special education needs.
Format: Workshop – 360 Minutes
This seminar can be adapted for all grade levels

For Dozens of Lesson Planning Ideas… For Your Differentiated or Response to Intervention Classroom Get this Book Now! Easy-to-implement and practical interventions Sample lesson plans and visual models Examples of how to address budgeting, staffing, performance, and student culture constraints Bring Susan to your campus! Featured seminar – Response to Intervention (RTI) Strategies

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Program Description:Presentation Description:
The biggest obstacle that teachers face when implementing Differentiated Instruction, Common Core, or when delivering interventions  to struggling learners or students with special education needs in their classrooms is lack of time. They don’t have the time they need to get everything that must be done accomplished. Consequently, they rush to deliver information as quickly as possible and fail to reach all levels of learners and learning styles as well as their students with special education needs.

Most teachers agree that they can teach a new concept to five capable, on grade level, students, in a small group, in ten minutes. Those same teachers also agree that, when they direct teach new material to the whole class, a portion of the class understands that new material after the first ten minutes of instruction while other students are still struggling.

Tradition would dictate that we go over the new material again, and maybe even again, in the hopes that those who haven’t “gotten it” will, but we know that rarely happens. What if, instead, we used real-time assessment and creative grouping techniques to focus our limited teaching time in a more productive way?

Chunking Lesson Plans^® is an innovative new way of lesson planning, designed by Susan Fitzell. This full day program introduces the concept of chunked lesson plans, explores best practice and brain-based teaching strategies for chunking, and shows teachers how to use their precious classroom time in ways that are more productive, reach more students, and increase achievement! Teachers learn to teach their lessons in manageable CHUNKS, allow time for students to PROCESS that information with high yield, researched based methods, and then ASSESS student achievement at the end of a lesson to adjust the next lesson.

This program includes time for teachers to prepare actual chunked lesson plans that they can use in their classes!

If your state has adopted Common Core State Standards (CCSS) or Next Generation Science or Social Studies Standards, Chunking Lesson Plans^® provides a solid framework to implement highly effective lesson plans to meet those standards.

Preferred Program Length: 360 minutes
Target Audience: General classroom teachers, special educators, and specialists in the classroom, Special Education Needs (SEN)
Grade-Level Appropriateness: All grade levels

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Effective Strategies, Dynamic Presentation
Engage Educators in Quality PD

Differentiated Instruction Strategies to Reach ALL Learners in the Inclusive Classroom

This workshop has also been titled “Special Needs in the General Classroom: How Do We Make It Work?” and “Successful Inclusion Strategies and Techniques for Differentiating Curricula to Meet I.E.P. Requirements,” among other things. This full day program explores the ways that the brain learns and discusses a variety of brain-based, research supported, “implement tomorrow” strategies that will help teachers reach ALL the learners in their classrooms including gifted, English language learners and students with special needs. The strategies and techniques in this program can be used to support your school or district’s differentiation initiatives, common-core implementation, or Response to Intervention requirements. If you want your teachers to realize increased achievement for their students, this program is the first step!

Intended audiences: Principals, Paraprofessionals, General Education Teachers, Co-teaching Teams, Special Education Teachers, English Language Teachers, Special Education Needs (SEN)
Format: Workshop – 360 Minutes

For Thousands Of Tips To Teach… So Your Students Are Top Performers Get this Book Now! Gain more knowledge on differentiation strategies to reach ALL learners Get Susan Fitzell's book Now. Don't waste any time Special Needs in the General Classroom, Strategies That Make It Work. Available in both print and electronic versions! Want quality professional development you can afford? Save time with this popular PD option: A Professional Development Kit, for all teachers, with a Graduate Credit Option! Bring Susan to your campus! Featured seminar – Differentiation Strategies to Reach ALL Learners in the Inclusive Classroom

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Program Description:Susan presents a smorgasbord of strategies that are simple, common sense, and effective during her differentiated instruction strategy blast. Discover how to keep learners engaged, to help students with organization and memorization, increase critical thinking skills, and make learning fun and meaningful. All strategies are based on solid educational theory and current research. Leave with successful strategies that differentiate instruction, and motivate ALL students, especially students with special needs in the general classroom. Gain proven, easy to implement research-based techniques that make teaching more efficient by reducing the need to re-teach, motivating the hard to reach learner and promoting responsiveness to instruction.

Subscribe to the Professional Development Program!

Intended audiences: Principals, Paraprofessionals, General Education Teachers, Co-teaching Teams, Special Education Teachers, English Language Teachers, Special Education Needs (SEN)
Format: Workshop – 45 to 180 minutes

For Thousands Of Tips To Teach… So Your Students Are Top Performers Get this Book Now!   Gain more knowledge on differentiation strategies to reach ALL learners Get Susan Fitzell’s book Now. Don’t waste any time Special Needs in the General Classroom, Strategies That Make It Work. Available in both print and electronic versions! Want quality professional development you can afford? Save time with this popular PD option: A Professional Development Kit, for all teachers, with a Graduate Credit Option! Bring Susan to your campus! Featured seminar – Differentiation Strategies to Reach ALL Learners in the Inclusive Classroom

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The debate continues: Is the best placement for under-performing students in general education or special education classrooms? When implementing Response to Intervention  (RTI) strategies, many teachers question whether students who need Tier Three interventions and, in some cases Tier Two interventions, should be in the general classroom as opposed to receiving special education services. Depending on your state or district interpretation of where RTI belongs, some districts and authors are calling Tier Three “special education,”. There are two schools of thought. Some believe placing students with others at their “level” is in the best interest of all. Some believe that including students who are atypical learners in the general classroom is the best option overall.

Students Achieve in an Environment of Excellent Teaching

After co-teaching in inclusive classrooms and witnessing the benefits of inclusion done well in schools and school districts around the country, I am convinced that most students achieve more in the general classroom with an environment of excellent teaching. The trend towards tracking students in leveled classes based on test scores and ability has not been validated by credible research over time. The research on tracking/leveling is about as inconclusive and controversial as the research on homework. Find a study that claims students perform best in leveled classes and there’s another one that states that students perform better in heterogeneous classes.

That said, a small percentage of students are best served within the framework of special education and special classrooms. However, the reality is that this is a small group. In many school districts, special education case loads are overwhelming. If we properly implement RTI, we allow special education teachers to work more intensely with the students who have the greatest needs.

Really Terrific Instruction (RTI) Reaches a Variety of Learning Styles

Response to Intervention provides general educators with the tools to reach most learners while allowing special educators to more effectively meet the needs of the student with special needs. With a system for Response to Intervention in place, secondary teachers can provide instruction that reaches a variety of learning styles, gives additional time where necessary, and monitors progress. The classroom teacher adjusts interventions based on student performance, as determined by progress monitoring. With RTI, classroom teaching is data driven and differentiated. Personally, I think RTI should stand for Really Terrific Instruction because that is what it is!

RTI Embraces Differentiated Instruction

RTI calls upon teachers to break away from the traditional mode of verbal linguistic and auditory teaching, especially at the middle and high school levels. It embraces differentiated instruction that responds to varying student learning styles. Teachers will get the satisfaction of seeing students become more successful than they ever imagined because they intervened with student centered strategies.

Because there is no textbook model currently available for implementation of RTI at the secondary level, there is no one way to implement the process. It is up to school districts to figure out how to best meet the needs of their learners.

While working on my recent book, RTI Strategies for Secondary Teachers,  I interviewed several school districts to see where they were in the RTI implementation process. The following are examples of RtI strategies in place.*

Community High School District 155 of Illinois has an RtI team composed of teachers, counselors, psychologists, building administrators, principals, and vice-principals. Still in the early stages of RtI development, they began the process in a logical place: establishing a strong foundation at Tier One. All secondary teachers in the district receive extensive training in differentiating instruction. The expectation is that those teachers will implement differentiated instruction in their classrooms daily. With a solid footing at Tier One, they are developing Tier Two, yet, they did not leave Tier One behind. They continue to improve upon Tier One, researching high quality best practices and exploring co-teaching. An important step they took was to research measurement and data collection options to identify a fitting measurement device for the many initiatives already implemented.

Southland Independent School District in Texas also has an RTI team in place, which includes an administrator, a reading specialist, and a dyslexia coordinator. At Tier One, all teachers regularly differentiate instruction. At Tier Two, general education teachers use flexible grouping three times a week. They also implement peer tutoring. At Tier Three, middle school students are pulled from their non-core classes for interventions that support core classes.

Southland’s eighth graders achieved a 100% passing rate on their state tests in 2010. Teachers feel this was a direct result of the RTI process.  It is interesting to note that at Southland, none of the students receiving Tier Three interventions are students with special needs. They don’t even have a special education teacher on the RTI team.

Havana High School of Havana Community Unit School District #126  (Illinois) employs the mantra, Every Child, Every Day and says they are at the “What do we need now?” stage of RTI implementation.

The sole high school in the district, Havana is home to only 350 students. Their RTI team consists of a social worker, a psychologist, a teacher, the principal, a school counselor, and an RTI specialist.  All teachers are expected to differentiate. Every freshman is assigned an adult mentor who checks in with the student every day.

If a student is earning lower than a C, the RtI team and the student’s mentor pull the student’s grades and meet with the student to discuss his or her learning. Consequently, no student slips through the cracks. Someone is always checking in with each student. If a student is failing a class, or in danger of failing a class, then that student is assigned to Academic Learning Support, a structured study hall. A skilled paraprofessional monitors the study hall room for the entire day at Havana. The paraprofessional has a list of students receiving RtI team assistance. Instead of covering a study hall, teachers are now available during that time for academic assistance.

As a Tier Three intervention, Havana High offers struggling readers a reading class, which counts as an elective. Students in the class receive direct reading instruction from the teacher, read novels, and use LEXIA reading software . Students who are struggling in math can take a double block math class, which provides them with one math credit and one elective credit.

Midland High School of Midland Community School District #7 (Illinois) is in the early stages of RtI development. Their RtI teams include co-teaching teams from the English and Math departments as well as the principal. The entire teaching staff is expected to differentiate instruction at Tier One regardless of whether students are receiving RtI interventions.

Midland is using The Key to Tracker learning assessment software  to monitor students’ learning progress. The co-teaching team divides their block-scheduled class with 20-minute interventions scheduled into each two-hour block: one at the beginning of the period and one at the end of the period. Each 20-minute intervention session targets a different set of students. There is an intense focus on the freshman class because having success as a freshman sets a student up for three more years of success.

RTI Models as Examples of a Starting Point

These school districts differ drastically in their process and progress. Any one of them could serve as a model for a starting point at your school or in your district. My goal in sharing these vignettes is to reinforce the message that, at this point in time, there is no one right way to implement RTI at the secondary level. I recently worked with a high school that believed they were making a mess of RTI. I disagree. The school diligently worked at assessing what they already had in place, evaluating next steps, and bringing in support to help them move forward. That’s a positive start.

Start the process, assess, adjust and reassess. Most importantly, once the process is started, support teachers and intervention specialists with hands-on examples of how to lesson plan for RTI.

*Given the lag time between the interviews, and publication, the schools referenced in this post may be at a different place with RTI at this time. The purpose of the examples is simply to show how many approaches there are to implementation.

For more information on differentiation and Response to Intervention, see Susan Fitzell’s book, RTI Strategies for Secondary Teachers.

Bring Susan to your campus!

Featured seminar – Response to Intervention (RTI) Strategies

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