Making Response to Intervention More Accessible

I always have such great conversations and idea-bouncing with my email buddy, a school psychologist in Ohio. She emailed me today with a question/query/frustration that I'm sure TONS of us, including myself deal with: teacher push-back and reluctance to adopt the Response to Intervention (RTI) model. Here's some of what she had to say:

"Myself and another psych in the district are trying to create a framework and/or standard protocol model for the RtI process... [T]here is a great deal of talk about the resistance we are facing in developing an intervention framework... My frustration is trying to foster teacher buy in.... I want to move towards identifying students area of weakness, developing a student specific goal and then selecting the appropriate intervention for said deficit... Right now, the IAT type meetings {student support team meetings, I imagine} we have involve the teacher complaining, the Interv. Spec. doing a small reading group and DIBELS and in 4-6 weeks saying no progress-evaluate. UGH!"

Agreed, agreed, 100%! With RTI now the legal requirement for eligibility, the mode into special education is going to be changing a lot, potentially without a lot of support to the people who have to do and/or monitor the interventions: the teachers! No wonder they fight back... they don't have the support, training, time, or understanding of the model in order to implement RTI the way it's "supposed" to be done. It's much easier to stand by the old "test and place" or "discrepancy" models, which are not as fair to the child as RTI is.

My district is huge and there's no guidelines or mandates about how RTI should be done or what it's expected to look like, only that we have to be doing it. We have no specific intervention building staff, and some of our reading/math support staff don't work with the kids, only coach the teachers. We do have a lot of tutors come in from local colleges, and are putting before and after school tutoring/homework help in place, but it's hard to monitor.

I try to be basic with RTI for my teachers, and think about it more like differentiation than a separate intervention... I think people get scared by the term "intervention." What I've found in requiring academic RTI data is that teachers are doing way more differentiation than you and they realize, and when you're trying to scrounge things together, many things can be recorded as intervention. For instance: pre-teaching vocab, re-teaching lessons, shortened assignments, reduced items per page, graphic organizers/outlines, visual aids (i.e. a reminder card on the desk of steps for writing a paragraph), specially spaced lined paper, practice writing sight words in sentences, math manipulatives (tiles, cubes, counters, charts), etc. These are things teachers typically do in a classroom, but if only a few kids are getting it, it's an intervention. Sure, there are bigger things too, like special tutoring, small groups, individual pull-out, etc, but those are often too cumbersome, time-consuming, and disruptive for teachers to wrap their heads around.

My biggest obstacle is getting good, sold, appropriate data. I can get beautiful narratives and excellent information to fill into Individualized Education Plans (IEPs), but if I don't have the numbers, it's less than useful. We use the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELs) pretty extensively for reading assessment. Every kiddo gets a quarterly progress monitoring, and those who are at the strategic (1 year behind) or intensive (2+ years behind) level get monitoring much more often. Usually, I have to rely on DIBELs and reading program lesson tests (pre- and post-) for my data. What I found from past experiences is that you don't have to have nationally normed, well-known sources of data for it to be useful and meaningful. Using things like the Dolch word lists, Fry's high frequency words, and other DIBELs measures aside from Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) are useful too [Letter Naming Fluency (LNF), Initial Sound Fluency (ISF), Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF), and Phonemic Segmentation Fluency (PSF) are good for the little kiddos, especially to measure decoding interventions].

In short, I try to remember that teachers are limited in their time, resources, and ability to conduct interventions. Make it as simple yet effective as possible for them and give them easy data tracking ideas. Meet them where they are. Remind them of all the differentiation they actually do, and find away to quantify it.

Readers, please share how your school/district manages RTI! How do you get teachers to "buy in"? What do you do to help/field/alleviate their frustrations? What sources of data have you found to be easy yet effective to implement?

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The Times They Are a Changin'

I'm quite aware that my blogging has hit rock bottom this summer. I am shamed. I blame the 25 cases I had to process during summer school. I've been BUSY testing, pumping out reports, writing IEPs, and sitting in CSE meetings. I've also had a number of days of district training to attend, which have also occupied my time. Alas, this is no excuse! I promise when the 2011-2012 school year begins, I shall return in full, in your face force.

My CSE team along with other colleagues are beginning to lay out our PBIS plan of attack, community service and enrichment activities, and the general improvements we want to make for next year. But I'd like to ask you, gentle readers, what you want to see from my blog during the next school year? More discussion of the CSE process and all that goes along with it? More on-the-job learning? More discussion of cases as they come across my desk? More individual and group behavioral intervention strategies? More hilarious encounters with my kiddos? I want to hear your suggestions, so please share everything and anything I can do!

Obviously for those following along at home, I will no longer be a first year school psychologist in September. This is great, because I've established some street cred in the building, will know the majority of the kiddos, and do have the slightest idea what I'm actually doing. I also will finally have my name on the psychologist's seniority list in Human Resources, which means I actually exist. However, this throws a monkey wrench into the whole "blog name situation." So, I ask for your assistance again, what should my blog name be changed to? Give me your suggestions! I don't want to change it too drastically, so that those casual readers won't recognize it, but it does need an update.

So there you have it folks. No longer will you sit idly by reading about my mishaps and miscreants. Today, I need your help! Give me blog name and blog content suggestions! And, please do enjoy the rest of your summer vacations, because September will be here before you know it! =D

Keep Your Hands, Feet, and Dart Guns to Yourself

Another one of my big challenges is the culture of violence that students bring into the school building with them. One of our universal rules housed under our Positive Behavior Intervention Support (PBIS) program is keeping one's hands and feet to one's self. Yet, all day I hear about kids who try to solve their problems with their hands instead of their heads. Fourth grade students bring in dart guns and BB guns to school. The police get called to take a student home after he throws a table in the lunch room. Middle school girls fight each other on the bus loop. Kids Hulk out and fling chairs across my office. What gives?

 I think the problem exists at two levels. First, students are told at home and on the streets to defend themselves. If I had a dollar for every time I've heard a student say, "My [mom, dad, brother, uncle, etc. etc. ad. nauseum] told me that if someone hits me, I hit them back," Boyfriend and I would be touring the UK this summer. Students learn from their families, the media, and their communities that it's okay to use violence to solve your problems. Did you ever see the Coyote trying to talk out his differences with the Roadrunner? Negative, and look where it got him.

Second, my students lack the necessary coping and problem-solving skills to resolve conflicts more effectively. These kids are reactive and rely on instinct because their culture has made them. They act without thinking nine times out of ten, which usually ends them up in hot water. We'd be adding Germany to our summer vacation if I had a dollar for every time I recite the following mantra with a student: "If he puts his hands on you and you don't hit back, who's going to get in trouble? But if you put your hands back on him, then who will get in trouble?" (Seriously. I can say with complete surety that I have said this at least one 95% of the days we've been in school. The other 5% is when I'm sitting in CSE meetings).

So what to do? Do I open up a School Psychologist Meditation Center where we can all be in peaceful bliss, poised in yoga asanas, chanting my mantra? Not likely, though that would be quite relaxing (I would nap). You have to start small, by encouraging and rewarding instances of positive conflict resolution and teaching the skills needed to make appropriate decisions. Easier said than done, however. You can teach and model and roleplay for 30 minutes every day, but Ronnie might still walk out of the building and jump someone on the way home. We can't change how they react outside the school building, but we have to do our best to reinvent how they behave inside it.

Any suggestions, tips, etc that have worked for others on this topic would be greatly appreciated!

The Cross-Country Team

One of the biggest frustrations/obstacles/WTHeck issues in my building are what my colleagues and I like to call "runners." Runners are kids who either refuse to enter the classroom or leave the classroom during instruction and roam/run the school building. Why do kids "run"?

• They came to school "off" from something that happened at home or on the bus.
• They are upset over something that happened in the classroom.
• They don't want to complete assignnments.

The concept of "running" completely blows my mind. Maybe it's the expectations I have from school environment I went through as a student. No other building I've worked in has had this issue. I've worked in suburban, rural, and urban schools before being hired here and I can count on one hand the total amount of times a student left a classroom. It was unheard of! Now, I can count on TWO hands the number of times students leave the classroom A DAY.

The biggest issues that runners pose is the fact that they are extremely disruptive and they are missing instruction. Not only do many of our runners actually run the halls, they also bang on lockers & classroom windows, throw materials into classrooms, yell, and slam doors. No, I am not joking. Yes, I work in a public elementary school building, not a day treatment facility. These kids are also out of the classroom during key instructional time. They either wander the halls, sit in or just outside the main office, or spend time "cooling down" in my office. In a building that is already "at-risk" in terms of state Math and English Language Arts (ELA) test scores, these kids need to be learning.

I'm not entirely sure why it has become acceptable for students to run. Is it something to do with the teachers? Is it the community and home life? Is it a lack of coping skills? All I know is that it can't continue if we want our building to function efficiently.

Any suggestions on how to not only help the kids, but to help the teachers and staff, are uber welcome.