Analyzing Your RtI: A Blog Series

2 years ago we started to really...like really...analyze our RtI process when a specialist came into my school to discuss research based interventions. She had so much to share: research based interventions, intervention menu boards, and background information on the RtI model.  Meeting after meeting my brain became more overloaded, frustrated, and (quite frankly) angry.

Que the rain cloud:

Why?  Her information was good.  It was accurate.  She was willing to help.  We needed it.

But I was so overwhelmed.

And what I realized was that we did not have our school set-up for this.  We did not have the structures in place to make RtI work for us.   But I did not understand this (at the time) and so my frustration grew.

And learning what I I didn't know (that I needed to know)...was my first step to understanding RtI.

Every school is so SO different.  What works for one may not work for another.  But that does not mean that we don't learn from each other.  We can take a some ideas from one school, some from another, a bit from yet another.  And that is what I started doing.  Reading, researching, and learning about how to make RtI work for us.

This summer I read an article titled: "Reviewing the Roots of Response to Intervention: Is There Enough Research to Support the Promise" by Tammi Ridgeway, Debra Price, Cynthia Simpson, and Chad Rose.  They outlined the components of RtI and those are: high quality instruction, research based instruction, common assessments, universal screening, continuous progress monitoring, fidelity, and professional development.

My building has gone through and analyzed these different components of our RtI model.  I am going to start a series of blog posts that will go through these parts of RtI and what we did to try to make a change.
An overview
High Quality Instruction
Universal Screening
Research Based Interventions
Continuous Progress Monitoring
Fidelity
RtI meetings
Professional Development
 My thinking may not match your school perfectly.  But my hope is that you can pull a little from here and some from other sources.

Em