Analyzing Your RtI: Research Based Interventions

After realizing our RtI model wasn't really working for us or our students, the teachers in my building decided to analyze the different components of our RtI model.  This blog series will go in depth with how we scrutinized each of the following parts of the model:
An overview
High Quality Instruction
Universal Screening
Research Based Interventions
Continuous Progress Monitoring
Fidelity
RtI meetings
Professional Development

 In the previous post, I described our assessment flow charts that help us to "nail" down the skills that each student needs to begin working on.  For some it may be phonological awareness, while another group of students need an intervention for fluency, and others may need a more comprehensive program like LLI.

But then what?  And who does them?  And how do you fit them all in the schedule?

Well...this is also going to vary greatly from school to school because we all have different resources, different constraints, a varying amount of support, and unique populations of students.   But I want to share with you what we did in the hopes that it can help you along your journey.

First things first...we had to figure out what we even had available to us.  We were looking for interventions that were research based, could be completed with fidelity, had a script or at least a very clear sequence.  When we sat down and really looked at all of our resources, this is what we discovered:

This list will certainly grow and change as we grow with our RtI model.  But it was and is a place for us start.

Some of our interventions are actual programs that are sequential and include all that we need.  These include PALS, LLI, Orton Gillingham, and Do the Math. But there were some gaps that needed to be filled and the Florida Center for Reading Research and Intervention Central are great resources to help fill the gaps!

Florida Center for Reading Research has some great hands on activities that lend themselves well to being used as a phonological awareness intervention.  To fit our needs, I typed them up.  Here is one example:

All of these interventions were put into a binder with tabs to separate the different components of phonological awareness.  Then we put all the materials needed to do any of the interventions in a bin and labeled them by the intervention number.

Intervention Central has some research based interventions for fluency and sight words that we found worked well for our students.  So I printed them off and also placed them in a binder so that they could be easily accessible to anyone conducting that intervention. 

As we continue on our journey through RtI, we will continue to evaluate how our interventions are working for our students.  Some guiding questions for us include: Are there any gaps that we are not filling?  Are the interventions that we are using providing the support needed for each individual?  Are there interventions that are not proving to have solid and productive results?

LLI will be a new intervention piece for us this year and I am super excited to use it!

The next piece to our RtI model...progress monitoring.

Em