I saw that there haven't been any postings for the secondary group and I felt the need to jump in.

While our school, Rolling Meadows High School, Rolling Meadows, IL, has done a great deal of recent work with RtI, we have found the insights of others to be the most beneficial.

I hope you'll join me in this important and rapidly developing aspect of secondary education. I have a lot of questions ask and a few insights that I'd love to share.

Thank you.

Charles Johns
Principal
Rolling Meadows High School
Rolling Meadows, IL

Hello-

In response, I am always willing to listen to insight!

I am only just becoming involved in our high school, so I am a beginner. However, I am interested in hearing how RTI has been working with your school.

SuAnn Schroeder
Teacher
Marshfield High School
WI

SuAnn:

Welcome aboard! My insights are pretty random right now, so throw me a few questions and I'll do my best.

Right now I'm fixated on the importance of teacher leadership to make RtI work. We just had a wonderful summer of workshops and professional development and I'm awed by the programs and interventions a large number of our teacher leaders developed.

We've facilitated this work by coordinating our RtI initiative with a broader Professional Learning Team initiative. So far, it seems to be working.

Of course, we're still pretty new to all of this. One could say that we're on the 3rd year of implementation, but we didn't know to call it RtI for the first year or two.

How far along is your school?

Take care,
Charles

I would love to read about your insights on implementing RTI at the secondary level. I am an experienced math teacher but new to my district and am currently a full-time remediation teacher. Our school has been working on implementing RTI but it looks like most of the focus has been at the elementary level. How do you identify those students that don't repsond to Tier 1 universal interventions? When you identify those students, how do you organize your Tier 2 interventions?

Kara
Remediation Teacher

Kara:

I had written a longer reply this morning, but it seems to have not made it. Maybe it will emerge later.

Basically, at this point, you will want to initiate a problem-solving process. Depending on the nature of the Tier 1 intervention and the follow up data, you will have a variety of possible explanations for why some students didn't respond. If the intervention was for math, it would make sense to have math teachers on your problem-solving team. Broader based interventions may require a staff with broader perspectives. You will want to get participants as close to the action as possible, but also some who can step back from the initial intervention to balance out potential bias.

There are quite a few resources for different problem-solving approaches. You're school psychologist may even have had specialized training. Otherwise, one of the school psychologist journals had some great resources 4-6 years ago. If you'd like, I'll track down the cites.

The problem-solving team needs to pour over the data and see if possible explanations can develop into working hypotheses. At this point, you're beginning an action research process. You'll want to continue to develop data tracking systems as you proceed.

One thing to remember, if the problem is academic and widespread, you will want to start your self-analysis at a curricular level. If the problem is more behavioral, such as not completing homework, you may want to look at instructional methods or classroom operation practices.

As you proceed your teams will get more proficient and the process will quicken.

Also, you'll begin to develop widespread interventions that will hopeful eliminate the need to keep breaking down the problem all the time. Well...at least I've been told this by ivory tower experts. I'm still unable to ease up analysis before routing students to different interventions.

I hope that helps. Please feel free to ask follow up questions. That way we can all learn from each other.

Take care.

Charles

Hi Charles. I really enjoyed your thoughtful comments on this discussion board. Would it be possible to visit your school and see some components in action of RtI that you mention.

Alan...