RTI – Response to Intervention
March 10th, 2006 by Christopher HarrisI have mentioned Response to Intervention (RTI) before, but only in brief passing as an area of potential concern for teacher-librarians. Compliments of a great workshop yesterday, this is your sneak-peak into an issue that is just showing up on the radar for schools. If your school (especially elementary schools!) is not having a conversation about RTI yet, this would be a great bit of information to share with your administrators. You might want to ask around, because it is very possible – as sad as I am to have to say this – that the conversation is taking place without the librarian being involved. This is a conversation we need to be a part of!
For those readers who are not in school libraries, I hope this doesn’t get to educational over the next couple of posts. I will be doing my best to take what I have learned and re-frame it at a friendlier level, but I feel this is an important issue for us to be aware of. I don’t think I am building this up too much when I say that this may well bring about at least part of the revolution that a lot of people in education have been looking for. The question is, are we going to be involved, or are we just going to watch from the sidelines?
I will also see what I can do to get some additional geekage mixed with the next few posts as well =)
Quick Questions:
So, what is Response to Intervention?
RTI is an instructional support model defined in Federal regulations as part of the recently reauthorized IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act).
Oh, so it’s a special ed thing, right?
Actually, no. RTI is a model that is implemented entirely in the general education setting as a way to identify and address individual student needs without resorting to wholesale classification of children.
So no more testing to determine disabilities?.
Testing will still be important, but the tests will be different. RTI moves away from the current model of diagnosing learning disabilities (the majority of classified students) by looking for a discrepancy between tested IQ and actual levels of performance.
How does the new RTI model work then?
According to § 300.307 (B): “in determining whether a child has a specific learning disability, a local educational agency may use a process that determines if the child responds to scientific, research-based intervention.” There are a couple of key bits in that statement. Most important is that for now, IDEA states that districts may use RTI. We have a couple of years to make this shift! Secondly, you will note that the intervention has to be scientifically research based (SRB). So to translate into plain English:
“Before you can classify a student as special education, schools can (but soon will have to) see how the child responds to different teaching methods that have been shown to be effective with other students.”
But where do I fit into this as a librarian? Even if it isn’t just a special ed thing, how is it a library thing?
Good question, but not really suitable for this quick Q&A section. In fact, it will take a whole separate post!
March 13th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
[...] esponse to Response to Intervention (RTI). In the last post, I briefly introduced RTI as a new model for approaching instruction. There is an emerging body of work online dealing with RTI, but I hav [...]
March 15th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
[...] Posted on Wednesday 15 March 2006 I have been talking about Response to Intervention (RTI) and how libraries fit in to the RTI model. In this post, we get to the real- [...]
April 23rd, 2006 at 7:50 pm
I stumbled across your site today and was so pleased to see that others are grappling with RTI too. We have had pre-referral teams in place in our district for the past 11 years and are now seeing the fruits of our labor. This is a general ed issue and we have just embraced the concept of using RTI documentation as well as testing data to inform our decisions regarding labeling students. We are piloting the use of this data along with the finidings made by our psychologists and are interested in knowing how other districts are proceeding and what guidelines they are giving staff. Thanks!
April 24th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
Stephanie,
Thanks for your comments. RTI looks very exciting, and I hope libraries will find ways to stay involved in this process.
February 11th, 2009 at 1:58 am
Hi,
Just wondering what your thoughts on the librarian participating with a reading group in the RTI model? I feel overwhelmed with normal library management duties, especially this year since my teaching load doubled to give teachers time to meet weekly for ‘data dialogs’ that accompany RTI. With that, I’m now teaching a benchmark second grade class four days a week for 40 minutes. Help! My principal claims that they value me and ‘feel’ my pain and understand my situation, but haven’t even made an effort to support my needs to fulfill my role as librarian. What can I offer to her to help her understand my problem?!