I would love to hear ideas people had for consensus building activities for their staff. RTI can be an intimidating change for some people and any suggestions on how to effectively smooth the transition would be wonderful! Thank you!

This is a good question and I hear it a lot in workshops and presentations. While I've done enough reading on leadership to know that we're supposed to garner consensus at the beginning of a change initiative, we went a different route with RtI.

I've come to believe that those of us in education have spent so much time with the roll out of each successive innovation that our teachers are weary whenever we introduce something new. With this in mind, we didn't introduce RtI until we had already developed a fairly stable system. Then, I was able to point out to our staff, "Here it is, it's built and now we just need to use it. It will make everyone's life easier. It's not perfect yet, but with your help we'll continue to improve it." I won't say that I have consensus, but I do know that a lot of our teachers are trying things and using our system. Additionally, we brought in teacher leaders to work on interventions that they were passionate about. This enabled us to have a broad base of support since so many people were involved in the sub-parts.

I'm fortunate, we have a great staff who are committed to the students and doing the right thing. But, they also work very hard and don't want to waste their time on what might be impractical dreams. By making it real, I think that they are seeing the value it the system.

Charles