Rich Reid: Good morning everybody out there, and welcome to this morning's webinar conversation, Reaching All Students: A Conversation about Response to Intervention. Specifically, what we'll be doing is looking at Response to Intervention as a vehicle for improving educational outcomes for all students.
The way we're going to set this up—I want to cover a few guidelines for this morning's webinar so that we're all comfortable with how it's going to proceed.
When the presenters are speaking we're going to mute everybody else who's on the webinar. That will allow you, if you're with peers and colleagues—you can chat about what's happening during the conversation, and at the same time it allows the—reduces the number—amount of distractions for the presenter. What we're going to do is let them speak for about 15 minutes on their topic and then we're going to open it up for questions for 15 minutes. And there are two ways you can ask questions. You can use your screen: you can raise your hand next to your name and we'll call on as many folks as possible. Down below that, where it says chat, you can type in a question and it goes to the moderator and the presenters. If you have any questions or problems over the course of the webinar, you might want to jot down the numbers on the screen. Mark Merena is our technical person here and those are numbers you can reach him at in order to resolve any issues that might arise. A number of people have logged on. The procedure for logging on so you can be a full participating member is first to log on to the site, then call in so that you can have the audio part. So if you haven't logged in, in that order, you might want to hang up and call in again and that will allow you to be a more active participant in the webinar.
Okay. Right now I'm going to turn it over to Carol Keirstead to give some background on why this webinar is occurring today.
Carol Keirstead: What I'd like to do first is to put everyone back on mute for a minute to do a sound check [sound check].
Okay. What I'd like to do, first of all, is just to welcome you on behalf of all the Centers that are co-hosting this event. My name is Carol Keirstead, I'm the Director of the New England Comprehensive Center funded by the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.
And I, along with two other colleagues, we're co-hosting this event. We're co-hosting with the New York Comprehensive Center which is another regional office funded by the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. And each of our respective Centers work to provide technical assistance to leaders in our region in support of meeting the goals of No Child Left Behind.
We're also partnering in this webinar with the Northeast Regional Resource Center and I believe we have Kristen Reedy and if Kristen could just say hi on behalf of the Northeast Regional Resource Center and tell folks a little bit about who you are.
Kristen: ... what we hope will be a series of webinars that we are co-sponsoring—NERRC with the New England Comprehensive Center—we're having a series of webinars. The map that you see is a map of the National Resource Center network. We are funded by the Office of Special Education programs who provide support to the states across the country.
Carol: Thanks, Kristen. What I'd like to do is just give you a little bit of background about why we're hosting this initial conversation about Response to Intervention. We have been in dialogue at the federal level with several organizations who are all interested in the potential of Response to Intervention, as a strategy, as an approach, to meeting the needs of all students. As you'll hear from our guest presenters, you'll hear something about, sort of, the origins of RTI, where it came from, what its definitions are, and particularly, more about what it actually is. We're very interested as a Center network in providing support to state leaders and using RTI as an approach for district and school improvement. So that's the reason for this initial dialogue, and we're very excited about sponsoring this and I'm going to turn it back over to Rich, who will introduce our presenters.
Rich Reed: Good Morning—my name is Rich Reed. I'm with the Northeast Regional Resource Center and I provide technical assistance to states who are examining this model. In the spirit of response to this intervention, we're going to present the information this morning in a tiered methodology.
We're going to start out with a broad overview of the research behind RTI, where it came from, and what might be the basic elements that need to be in place, relative to a model of student support that is characterized by this Response to Intervention. Then we'll move into some presenters that are going to chat with us about the practical application of these RTI elements that when you're trying to do a districtwide initiative to improve student outcomes and then lastly, we're gonna chat about, at the school level, what does RTI mean where the rubber meets the road in terms of for the classroom teachers, for the students, and for the building level administrators. So we're going to begin with Greg Roberts, who is the principal investigator and Associate Director of the Center on Instruction at Texas on learning disabilities. That's a mouthful. He's trained as an educational psychologist, with expertise in quantitative methods and measurement and program evaluation. Currently the focus of his research is responsiveness to intervention. One of the things that makes Mr. Roberts—Dr. Roberts—a good presenter here is that he's got a broad range of experience. He's also been a classroom teacher, elementary level K–6, he's been a special educator, and so he's had a breadth of experience in terms of working in the schools. So at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Greg Roberts who's going to chat with us about the foundations of RTI. [very long silence]
Greg: ...person is often I learned as much if not more than those that ostensibly are there to learn from me. I think one of the interesting things about RTI is its dynamism in the sense that it isn't the static, necessarily tangible thing. It's something that varies or evolves depending on how it's applied and where it's applied. So it's always interesting to me to hear how those that are actually doing RTI in schools, districts, and states. How they're doing that, what they're finding successful, and what they're continuing to struggle with. So I'm hoping after the 3 speakers finish, to hear from you about what is and isn't perhaps working. My presentation is very much at a more general level. I recognize many of you out there are operating at more sophisticated levels but, the purpose of this meeting and point of my talk is to provide just a basic grounding in RTI. And that's what I've attempted to do. Here is the contact information. If you have questions afterwards or if you have a need to follow-up, I'm happy to hear from you. My contact e-mail is there.
The purpose—the reason—I'm chatting here today; there are three. One is Response to Intervention: how does it work, and how is it implemented? And sort of embedded in all of that, I can talk also about the history of RTI. It's not a new thing. It's a hot topic; I've heard it described that way by a number of people recently, but it's not necessarily a new topic. In fact, I think some would argue that in ways, it returns us to sound, common-sensical past of educational thinking and approaches. It does have its basis in both a public health model—If you think about public health, where the purpose is to prevent illness so that we save money, time, and agony in having to treat later illness, you can I think, see the application to RTI. Secondly, it, in a more direct way, can be traced to a 1982 report that was commissioned by the federal government that looked at over-representation of minority students in special ed. And the authors of that report were Heller (H-E-L-L-E-R), Holstman, and Methick and that was, again, in 1982. And their recommendations really set the stage for, created a framework for, RTI. When we talk about it now, it's evolved considerably from 25 years ago, but you can definitely see the seeds there in terms of what we're doing now in this area.
What is Response to Intervention? It has, again, been around in one form or another, for some time. It didn't really become a prominent part of the national dialogue until passage of IDEA 2004. The language you see here is the sub-section within the legislation that gives authority or opportunity to states to use a, really a Response to Intervention model, for identifying students as specific learning disabled. I'm not going to read that to you—it's pretty legal-sounding language but, basically what it is saying is that states have to give districts—LEA's—an opportunity, guidance, and regulations to implement—develop and implement an RTI model for identifying students with LD and—this is a point of confusion out there and I think it's important that we clarify it here and clarify it for those you work with—districts are not required to do RTI. They can—states have to make that possible, but districts are not at present, and I don't know of any reason this would change, required to do RTI.
RTI really, and this is becoming less the case, but still it is discussed in two general ways, and this was mentioned early on in this webinar, but it I think deserves just a little bit of detail. Again, in the IDEA language, RTI is talked about in terms of identifying students as SLD and that's specific learning disability. And there's quite a bit of work out there that is organized around that purpose. In fact, a lot of the early work in RTI was organized around its utility, its ability, effectiveness in identifying students as SLD. What happened in the course of that work, is that a lot of scholars and a number of practitioners, people out in the field, began to realize that this is something more than simply another way of, you know, identifying kids who may be struggling for reasons beyond simply poor instruction. This may actually be a way of improving the way that we deliver educational services to all kids, improving outcomes, making instruction more effective, making allocation of resources more efficient. It began, I think, to occur to folks that this is something bigger than we thought it might be at first.
So that's the second sort of school of thought, is the school improvement approach to RTI. The school improvement approach recognizes the usefulness of RTI as a way of identifying students with SLD but they see that more as a consequence of doing RTI, not as its purpose. It is, if you will, the outcome, one possible end-point for an RTI process, not its motivating or driving purpose.
So within those two, sort of camps, if you will, the talk today is very much from the perspective of the school improvement approach. That's the work that we do here on the Center on Instruction, at the University of Texas, and it's the model that we think shows potential promise and in places, and we'll hear more about this from the other speakers later, in places where it's been implemented as a school improvement type model, the results are extremely encouraging and in some cases, remarkable. The features of RTI, and this is true regardless of the camp, whether school improvement or SLD ID only. There are four basic features and I think most people agree on these.
The first is universal screening, the second is generally effective core instruction, and I put generally effective in quotes because that's right out of the IDEA 2004 language and it's key. It's not OK to just have kids in a classroom. They've got to be doing something in there that is recognized, that is evident in supporting its use for, you know, increasing achievement and learning. Progress monitoring—this is, I think, of all of these, perhaps the most unique, in terms of identifying RTI from more usual practices. And I think there's a lot that can be said about that. We don't have time for that this morning, so if you have questions about that, or if your district or state or your regions are struggling with that I would refer you to the National Center on Student Progress Monitoring (NCSTM). They have a very good website with a lot of great information and you can get a lot more there than I can give you over the phone here. The fourth feature is increasingly intense instruction based on student need. This is what gives RTI its characteristic tiered flavor. You may have heard of a three-tier model, a four-tier model; a couple years ago I heard someone was developing a seven-tier model. I probably wouldn't recommend that. But all of that was motivated by a desire to organize things so that kids get what they need. And if they don't need a level of intensity or focus in a certain area or a certain level, they can move on and work in areas where they, you know, find more challenge and their learning is enhanced. So RTI is not only about those kids who are struggling. There is opportunity and room in there to address the needs of those who are at level and even above level
The focus in RTI, and in both camps, both the SLD ID and the school improvement model, but I think particularly in school improvement, is this idea of prevention and improvement and the way that that's operationalized, if you will—the way that that takes shape, is in these tiers or levels. And here I've identified three but you shouldn't, again, misunderstand this as a recommendation for a three-tiered model. I think is going to vary based on the circumstances, the needs, the capacities, and the culture really, if you will, of the school, district, or state that's trying to implement RTI. There's not clear research advocating a certain number of levels, and in the absence of that, I think, decisions need to be made based upon the local need and recommendations of folks like yourselves.
Primary level is all students receive instruction, monitoring within the general ed classroom; this is generally effective instruction, progress monitoring, using reliable, valid, very brief, efficient measures 3–4 times a year, is what typically is recommended. Based upon the results of that progress monitoring, you're going to, or teachers will identify, a sub-sample or a sub-group of students who aren't really doing as well as they need to do in order to be on track for later success. Numbers are going to vary depending on where you are and the schools that you may be working with but as a rule is that the goal is that the primary level of intervention, if you will, should address the needs of about 80% of the students in your school, your district or your state. Now again, that's going to vary, and at another call at another time we can talk about ways of addressing situations where that simply isn't a reasonable expectation. But in terms of a goal, that's a reasonable goal, trying to get 80% of kids at or above level based upon progress monitoring in that primary level of intervention.
Secondary level, this is for students who don't respond, or don't respond adequately to primary levels. The important point here is we're talking about services, not about setting. And so these are kids who need a more intense experience, and intensity is increased or enhanced by providing them with more time, after school, before school, within the school day, or providing them with, you know, more focused instruction. And that can be done by delivering that instruction in small, same-ability grouped settings or by very carefully targeting instruction based upon the results of progress monitoring or perhaps the diagnostic measure that really sort of pinpoints the skills that they're missing and that they need support around. And these students are also progress monitored. Again, it's going to vary, but a lot of sites have found at least weekly, maybe several times a week, is an effective schedule for progress monitoring with these students. You want to know right away what effect your instruction is having, if any. And if it isn't, you want to change your instruction. Again, though, this secondary level can happen in the classroom—hopefully it's not happening in the hallway, but it may be. It may be a pull-out type of experience. That, I think, is less critical than the necessity for providing more intense, more focused instruction.
Tertiary level—this is for students who are not responsive or inadequately responsive to secondary level instruction. This may or may not be special ed. One of the issues with special education—as you know, moving a student into special ed and then moving that student back out of special ed—that's no small thing. So one of the features, one of the beauties, I think, of RTI, is from the permeability, maybe, of the barriers between the different levels. You can move kids from you know, primary to secondary, secondary to tertiary based upon their need. Once you move a kid into special ed, movement back out is much much more constrained, and so you lose that opportunity to vary intensity depending on need.
Still there are going to be kids that are clearly not responding to what we might consider typical instruction in each of these levels—at any of these levels. And these kids, going back to the earlier discussion about the different camps, those kids would be the kids that we would identify as SLD, specific learning disability. After sort of the end of this process, it should be becoming clear that this is not a teacher problem, this isn't an instruction problem, this really in fact may be a kid problem. This is different, now, than what current practice would suggest. Right now, if you think about the way it works, kids—well, number 1, we have to wait until they fail to engage the process, and even then, we're making a lot of assumptions about the quality of instruction that they may have received up to that point. We're assuming that it's all been good and well and that any problems the kids may be experiencing are kid problems, not instruction problems. I think what we've learned, and what all of us agree on, is that [for] at least a sizable minority of kids, they may be more casualties of poor instruction than they are true cases of specific learning disabilities. So RTI is, we want to get them before they fail, intervene, provide them with what they need, and if they continue then to struggle more and more we are able to eliminate poor instruction as one of the hypotheses for explaining that struggle. It's looking more and more like this kid has a learning disability and really would benefit from an alternative setting.
Here within those three—primary, secondary, tertiary—these are outcomes of doing intervenes well, you can expect to reduce the number of new cases, reduce the duration of existing cases, and reduce the complications from established cases of severe difficulty learning. Basically, the idea is, as I've said before, get them before they fail, help them when they can really benefit from that help, and then, what we think, anyway, that will lead to is more effective service within special ed. because the kids who are in that setting, are kids who really perhaps need to be and can benefit from that setting and that will give our service providers, our special educators a better opportunity of being successful. Because they can then apply what they've been trained to do to situations that are consistent with that training.
The advantages—again, early identification as a risk model rather than deficit model, reduction of identification biases, focus on student outcomes, and this is my last slide I believe. The point here—the big point here, and this is not always a popular point, so I always prefer to make it over the phone, rather than face to face—but the traditional way of identifying kids as LD, you know, we give them a measure of achievement, we give them a measure of intelligence, and we try to identify discrepancies between the two. Kids that are of normal or above normal intelligence but low achievement and if the gap between those two is sufficient, we then identify those kids as LD. There is virtually no research that supports that model in terms of identifying kids as LD, in terms of school, or even life outcomes. Intelligence, on a certain level—we're not talking about children who maybe have mental retardation—but at a certain threshold level, above 80 or so, intelligence seems to play very little of a role in terms of kids being successful in school. Certainly, brighter kids are more successful, that's not the point. But all kids can be successful with the exception of a handful who maybe have a severe learning disability, and even then, in a special education setting, the thinking is that success can be promoted. That wasn't my last slide—I think this is. No—it's not. Let me just make a few points here.
Evaluating instruction—is it generally effective? These are some areas you can look at to make that determination. One of the big issues here is going to be fidelity to programs. And I'm not talking here about scripted instruction where teachers stand up and read from a teacher's manual. I don't think that was ever anyone's intention. And I know there are teachers out there that do that and are supported in doing that because the thinking is that that's being faithful to an instructional model. I don't think that is true, but I do think that there are features of effective instruction and these are some of those. And these are across particular programs. There are some programs that are better than others, I mean, let's be honest, some that are more aligned with evidence in research. But I still, any day, would rather have a very good teacher with an average program than an average or below-average teacher with a very good program. I think effective instruction isn't a function of the program. It's a function of teachers' use of programs or instructional materials. And these are some of those instructional teacher behaviors that I think would be critical for success in the sort of primary and maybe secondary levels of intervention.
In planning intervention, these are some of the questions to maybe think through. Again, it's not about setting, it's about services. And you'll see that all of these are organized around that question. Who's going to do it? For how long? What are they going to do during that time? That's the bottom line and that is my last slide. Thank you.
Rich: Thank you, Greg for squeezing into 15–20 minutes something that could be a day-long discussion. At this time, we have a couple of hands that are up. I'm going to check in with those folks and if you've formulated questions and want to raise the hand next to your name, I'll reach you. So I'm going to walk through. Mary Barton, did you have a question you wanted to pose?
[discussion about questions; no questions raised.]
Rich: Well, Greg I think this is a testament to your clarity. What we'll do is move on to our next piece. Greg will be available to answer questions if others arise over the course of the webinar.
The next person we're going to hear from is Joe Sassone. He's a former assistant superintendent from a school in Vail, Arizona and during his tenure there he initiated a systemwide improvement initiative that looked at components of RTI and how they could be applied to a school to improve a significant problem. Speaking with him is also John Carruth who at the same time was the assistant superintendent for special projects. And what they're going to do is outline how they used components of RTI to deal with some issues that their data was suggesting that they needed to work on their math with their students. They're going to take a districtwide perspective so we'll turn that over to them now.
Carol Keirstead: While Rich is doing that I just want to let folks know that we are recording this audio presentation and we will make available both the audio recording and the slides on our website and we'll give you those links later on.
Joe Sassone: Good Morning, everybody. My name is Joe Sassone and I'm currently with WestEd right now and was the assistant superintendent to Vail Unified School District. And I just want to briefly introduce my colleague John Carruth. He and I have worked together for the last five years as assistant superintendents implementing an RTI model and starting on the school level, and then bringing out in the district level. So I'll let John just do a quick introduction.
John Carruth: Good Morning. My name is John Carruth and let me give you a quick shot of my background. I'm a special education teacher and have been the district special ed. director and assistant superintendent for the last seven years. That just captures my frame of reference in regards to Response to Intervention.
Joe Sassone: So John and I quickly realized several years ago, that to do a districtwide improvement plan, he and I needed to work together, and we needed to somehow join the general ed. curriculum with special ed. and actually roll out an initiative as partners, rather than being isolated from one another. So I'm just going to give you a quick little snapshot of the Vail Unified School District. We're actually located in Tucson, Arizona, on the southeast part of Tucson. We are not in Vail, Colorado, unfortunately, so we have to deal with the heat down here. We're in a rapidly growing school district. We averaged over the last 10 years at least 12% student growth. We are building at least 1–2 schools a year. We actually moved from a K–8 school district to a K–12 school district in 2001, and we have been rapidly adding high schools to our school district. Sixty percent of our teachers have less than three years experience teaching in our school district. We hire 100–120 teachers a year so we are always enculturating and need to have strong induction programs with our new teachers, as we constantly change each year. Right now our special education population is 12%. Again, that fluctuates up or down just due to our growth. In our K–12 population right now we have approximately 8,200 students. Back in 1999, we had 3300 so that can give you a little [idea of] how fast we've grown in the last eight years or so. I'm going to let John talk a little bit about the RTI model in action and how we started to roll this out districtwide.
John: The RTI model that we utilize is called STEEP or Screening to Enhance Equitable Placement. It was a model developed by Dr. Joe Witt out of LSU. We've been implementing this model for the past five years and it's currently in all K–8 schools—we have it in nine schools—and it's a protocol-based model in regards to the intervention piece.
As Greg mentioned, it has multiple levels; ours is a three-tiered model. There's two primary pieces I think are important to point out here. The first is where the arrow is—it's the effective instructional practice. That is the place where Joe and I collaborated the most. Joe was over on the curriculum side of things and we quickly realized after our universal screening, that we needed to do the lion's share of the work in regards to improving instruction by shoring up what we were doing daily with effective instructional practices in the classroom. The individual intervention piece, and it is Response to Intervention, so we do want to see kids respond either positively or negatively to the intervention.
Our protocol-based model is a scientifically based model that we utilize a guided practice, independent practice with progress monitoring on each skill in reading, writing, and math. And that's what we do. We only provide that individual intervention, if, once we determine that there is no classwide problem, in other words, core instructional problem within that class. And those students are within the bottom 16% and in the frustrational range on those core skills. Then we provide a targeted, protocol-based, individual intervention and track, on a daily basis, how they respond to that intervention. If they fail to respond to that intervention, we then proceed to further evaluation and, more specifically, look at if they require special education services.
When we began five years ago, we went in and provided universal screening again, in reading, writing, and math. There was no universal problem or schoolwide problem in the elementary schools in regards to reading, which was comforting because we had just embarked on, two years before, a comprehensive reading improvement process. However, we did find a pervasive math problem. We went in and screened in 4th grade with basic math facts, 0–9, and found that the majority of our students in 4th grade were at the frustrational level with that skill. We then sampled back all the way through first grade and sampled up through high school, and the picture was basically the same. We had a core problem with the way we were delivering instruction. To me, the key piece there is, you can't say it's an issue in regards to a kid or teacher. It was a system problem. So that's again where Joe and I began working together.
Joe Sassone: We're going to move back to the summer of 2002, kind of where we all started here and the slide that you see in front of you is our state assessment results for grade 3, 5, 8, and 10—and it's our 2002 math. Our state assessment system is called AIMS. And you can see in third grade 71% of our students were proficient; they met or exceeded the standard, and then it dwindled from there. In 5th grade only 49% of our students were meeting or exceeding our math standard on our state assessment and it went down to 18% in 8th grade, and then in high school 28%. Now the pressure on us was that our 10th graders needed to pass this assessment to graduate from high school according to our state accountability, although almost 70% of our students were not passing this high-stakes test the first time around. Basically, my superintendent, John's superintendent, basically came to us and asked us this question in 2002: "So how do you feel when you had the lowest test scores in the Valley? You know, when you're at a meeting with your colleagues, and this was all in the newspaper. How do you feel about that?"
You know, there really wasn't a quick answer for that. Actually, I didn't give him an answer but I knew that he wasn't feeling too good about it when he met with his colleagues and his colleagues who were superintendents in the Valley. So we knew we had to respond to this pressure. Not only did we have a state accountability system, but of course No Child Left Behind came out, so we really had to look at ourselves in the mirror and try to figure out what was wrong and how could we respond.
Here is the screening. This is our universal screening that we gave at that time and really showed us a pervasive problem in grade 4. Each bar represents a student—just to clarify—40 and below is in the frustrational range. If you look on the left side of the axis, you'll see 20, 40, 60, 80. So 40 was mastery and when you draw that line and you look at all these students in the grade level, we only have less than 1/3 of our students even proficient in a 3rd grade skill in 4th grade. When we did our universal screening grade 2 through high school we found the same graph.
So math was our greatest challenge. We had very little fluency in any kind of basic skills grades 2–9. We had schoolwide math issues in our curriculum. Students were entering our high schools with very little basic skills, where they couldn't actually do the math in algebra, geometry, or algebra 2. We had very little response in our system to help students, very little accountability, and basically very little to no student intervention. Basically, we had homework help in the afternoon.
We just had a quick question [which] I'll ask: "The universal screening for math"—John, do you want to explain that real quick?
John: Sure. The universal screening that we used in math there, at the time and still today, there aren't a ton of available universal screening tools available for math. In fact, we're looking to pilot a study with Joe Witt and Fuchs and Amanda Vanderhaven in the fall in regards to that. But what we did, we sat down and looked at the core skills that we expected each student to know by grade level—a single core skill that would be representative of what they should be able to perform. In 4th grade for example, the big idea for math in 3rd grade, is to know multiplication in and out to a very high degree. So we thought that using basic math multiplication facts, 0–9, would be a good screening tool, and that's what we used at that time. Then we did that same process first grade through high school.
Joe: Some questions we need to all ask ourselves, and I'm sure you've all heard of the professional learning communities and all, but this book, Getting Started, was kind of like my professional epiphany, where I really realized that it was more about student learning, and we needed to focus ourselves as a district around student learning. And we needed to ask ourselves some questions and we read this book together as an administrative team and really talked about these three questions: What do we expect students to learn or know? How will we know what students have learned? And how will we respond to students who are not learning? These were critical questions for us, because we actually never asked these questions before. So we developed a system where, and this is in a school; I'm going to highlight only one school [but] we've actually rolled this out to all of our elementary schools and our middle schools. And we actually have it in our high schools as well.
But we wanted to respond to all learners. And one thing that we learned from this process, is that, if we don't have strong school intervention programs or models within the school day, we will only mirror the socio-economics of our community. And what we figured out is that we wanted to use less of a pull-out model, and we wanted to make sure we had strong intervention programs in the school day for all students regardless of ability.
The first thing that we did was we had teachers get together and look at our state standards and come up with essential standards. You may have heard of them; they're called power standards. We unpacked those standards, using a backwards design model—UBD—and then we created pretty comprehensive instructional calendars or curriculum maps. We had skills isolated and taught every week.
Then we asked teachers to come together and we designed many formative assessments. So once instruction was done in the area of math—now, we did this in math because that was our pervasive problem. We wanted to see how students were learning right after instruction. So, for example, we may have a standard in 2nd grade, "I can count the amount of money up to ten dollars in coins and dollars." Teachers would instruct that in their regular classroom for five days, and at the end of five days we would give this mini-assessment. And then once the assessment was given, teachers graded the assessment.
And we were looking for 80% mastery. So if we used a five-question assessment, students should get four out of the five correct. Once we did that, teachers graded these assessments, and then put students into proficiency levels. So if a student was in the mastery group and had 80% or 100%, they were put into an enrichment group. If they got three out of five correct, they were put into what we call "approachers" group: they're approaching the standard. Then if they got two correct, one or none correct, we put them into a "falls below the standard" group. We put them into these three different proficiency groups.
We had teachers work together and what we did, in the middle of the school day, we gave 30 minutes of intervention. We called it "Re-teach and enrich," where students in this grade level would get extra instruction the following week after the initial instruction in the classroom and receive extra instruction at their proficiency level. What we did was we added a specialist to a grade level. For example, say in 2nd grade, we added a math specialist. And if we had four teachers in 2nd grade, now we had five, so we can make our groups smaller. And during the 30 minute intervention, we made small groups and we delivered a differentiated instructional model to students at their proficiency level.
And the whole goal was this: The goal was to move each student up one proficiency level by the end of the week. And teachers designed re-teach and enrichment lessons. Once students reached mastery, we quickly moved the lesson to enrichment. You know, enrichment looks more like, it's more student-to-student interaction, really looking at high cognitive levels of instruction. And at the re-teach model, we wanted to make sure that we were individually intervening [for] the student. And we included all students—if they were ELL, if they were special ed.—they were included in this model.
So you can see here on this chart, this is pretty much how we flowed our Response to Intervention model through the general curriculum. And we gave the formative assessment, teachers had a data conference, then we moved students into enriched activities or re-teach. At the end of the week, what we did was we re-assessed students, informally or formally, to see if they reached proficiency. If they did not reach proficiency at the end of the week. And we were ready to move onto a new skill, those students received targeted interventions through tutoring programs, through a cushion model, through Saturday school, or we have an intercession model, so we're constantly making sure we give those students instruction.
This is pretty much where we were at Mesquite in 2002. The proficiency levels are, fall far below—that's the light blue—we had 7% there. Approaches, that's 48%. Meets is 9% and exceeds is 36%. And in our state, to pass the state assessment you have to be in the meets and exceeds. Approaches, you're not passing. And our whole challenge was we had this pervasive math issue. We could not move the approaches over into the other two areas in three years. Through this model, the first year we did it, and we had a half year of implementation and we had to work out a lot of kinks, we finally got movement. And you can see, that 48% went down to 35%. But what surprised us this year was that the exceeds grew. We had students move two proficiency levels! So we kind of held everything close to our chest and said, "maybe it's a good cohort."
So then we did it again for a whole year of implementation and we got this result. And the 35 went down to 19, and again we had growth in the exceeds. The following year, after two and a half years at this school, at 5th grade in 2005 we had 98% of our students pass the assessments. One percent fell below; one percent approached. And last year at this school, our 4th year of implementation of this model, we had 100% of our students, including our special ed. students, who took on-level testing, pass our state assessment.
This is our elementary school. This is how the school fell last spring on our math assessment in Arizona. We hit actually 100% in grade 5 and grade 7. We went back in and re-screened after that process and looked at that universal screen skill and this is what it was in the beginning. That was a re-screen after about 6 weeks of intervention in regards to that same skill. And then what we've done, specifically for math, is that we've developed a schoolwide math intervention. It takes 15 minutes a day. We use a weekly math probe to check retention, and then we progress monitor that probe. And then we also use a monthly multi-skill math probe that is representative of all the skills that we expect students to know at that grade level. And we do that once a month.
This is an example of a 5th grade weekly math skills that we expect our students to reach a mastery level, to a fluency criterion, by grade level and you can see they range in number from between about six skills to about 13 skills. But that's an example of what we've come up with.
What this slide is here is just representative of how that has helped school psychologists and the number of referrals. And I do also strongly agree that the benefit to special education is the by-product of doing it well; it shouldn't be the primary focus. But we went from doing anywhere between 20 to 25 evaluations at the elementary level prior to implementation to doing about 10 after this implementation. And the evaluations that we were conducting were 100% matches with what the response said. In other words, the kids who weren't responding were qualifying quite closely. And I always caution to say that, because I'm concerned that people are thinking we're missing kids, that we aren't. We know, if not on a weekly basis, then on a monthly basis, for sure, how all of our students are doing on every single skill. So if they're still struggling, we can work with them and provide them with a targeted intervention.
Again, this is just representative of how this has affected our special education population. The biggest thing, I think, here is to point out that it's reduced. While we've experienced tremendous growth in our district, we have cut our LD—our specific learning disability—population in half, from 6% to 3%. Our total special education population has dropped just a little bit, and when we've done further analysis, what we've looked at is our numbers of students who are categorized as OHI has grown a little bit, as well as our students who are categorized as speech language only. We're more accurately identifying those kids who have receptive language issues and targeting that. As low as OHI—you know, I feel comfortable with that because it requires a medical certification or diagnosis. So I think we're more accurately working with the special education population.
This is a result—these are changes in our AIMS math course districtwide. You can see the yellow bar is 2003 and the light blue bar is 2006. In essence, we went from about 45th in the state in regards to our math performance, and in 2006 we were in the top 5% of all districts in the state, in regards to our math performance.
John: Just a quick thing from assistance standpoint, if you're looking to implement. We used the external pressure of the accountability movement and also changes in the wind with IDEA in regards to Response to Intervention to help provide external motivation for change. And then we've kind of set up our own internal pressure, as Joe mentioned, looked at the key pieces of what we wanted to do: focusing on student learning and student outcomes. And then one of the main critical things, I think, is important when looking at using an RTI model is, how are you addressing the sustainability of the process? And I always recommend to people, please start small. Start small with a motivated principal, a motivated staff. Provide them the training, finances, materials, and resources they need. And then, once you have the kinks worked out, move the model out into other schools. And you grow capacity based on being able to do that. That, in essence, is how we did it. And that's it. [very long pause]
Rich: We have a question from Janet McDuffy that she'd like to ask you.
Janet McDuffy: Hello. I'm just interested; as I'm listening—and it's kind of strange because there are three of us in the room—you're talking about an intervention. Are you using any particular programs? It's my understanding, having listened to Michelle, that in fact, you developed your own. Is that correct?
Joe: Yes. [laughter]
Joan: When you refer to AIMS testing are you referring to AIMSweb Pro Math testing?
John: No. Let me be clear. There's a ton of resources that are available now, that perhaps weren't when we got started. Intervention Central has a ton. There's a variety of different places that you can go to look to begin to get some of the core probes that are there. We based a lot of our RTI work on the Fuchs's work, Joe Witt's work, and Stan Beeno's work.
Joe: We purposely did not buy a canned program. We tried that and we found them to be very ineffective. And we...
Joan: I haven't been able to find one.
Joe: Well, there aren't, really from what I've found. Well, there are some, but we wanted to make sure that we designed good, formative assessments, we had good universal screening, we were able to—teachers were very good in understanding the individual needs of that student—and we needed to make sure, the school district, to make sure we got the teachers the resources they needed to address that specific need. And that was probably the biggest area, how to respond to that. You know, at first teachers didn't know how to design a re-teach lesson. Because they would say, "I already taught it last week." And re-teach is not slower and louder, it's really very different from the initial instruction. We need to give a lot of professional development—give them, find resources that would fit that need. And then enrichment—they struggled with enrichment. And it wasn't do more and do harder; it was really addressing when students—make sure it's more specific, make sure it's hands on—really using the art of teaching to get students to interact with each other. And we had to make sure we get them the resources for that.
Joan: So, for progress monitoring, you're weekly progress monitoring; that too was your own invention. That was not the AIMSweb stuff; that was something you made up yourself?
Joe: It was our own invention. What we did was, we got our grade-level teachers, our curriculum department, our special ed. teachers together—we all got together and looked at the critical skills students needed to know for that grade level and the next grade level, and we came up with an agreement in math—at least 12 skills in almost every grade level, right? about 12–13, depending on grade level—that we wanted students to be fluent in and know before they got to the next grade level.
John: You referenced AIMSweb. I think that's a good product, a good process that exists now that, again, quite frankly, didn't exist when we first started. So we had Dr. Amanda Vanderhaven, who's one of Joe Witt's doctoral students, here with us, who helped us do the research design on what we came up with. But I've seen and looked at the AIMSweb material, and it's good. We couldn't have done it if we didn't have access to the researcher, to be able to create that. If you don't, I would think AIMSweb is a good place to start.
Joan: Okay. Alright. Thank you. Bye.
Rich: Joe, there was a question posted online. A lot of folks are wrestling with dealing with math reasoning, and wondering if you had any insights or any thoughts or ways that you were successfully able to deal with that.
John: One of the issues that we found with the math reasoning, because the core basic math fact fluency was not there, our students just didn't have the ability to do that. I always say, "fluency is not speed; it's speed and accuracy." I always think that gets missed a little bit because you think you're doing a timed test to see how kids can rush through. It's not. It's really how proficiently and accurately they can do it in a timed manner. But what we found was, that once we addressed that basic math fact fluency issue, that the math reasoning portions have gone up tremendously. Some anecdotal examples of that are: high school algebra teachers now are—they can't believe how fast they're able to move through algebra content because they're not having to wrestle with students who are struggling, counting on their fingers, struggling with facts such as division, multiplication, fractions, that kind of thing. So we have not done anything specific in regards to math reasoning but in looking and building those core skills, that's really helped.
Joe: What also happened with the math reasoning piece, the reason that we unpacked our standards, was that we wanted to make sure we addressed that math reasoning thing and addressed what students should know and do. We really wanted to hit the do part and understand what knowledge level do we want to bring students to. If we were going to use the Web knowledge level, the Marzano knowledge level, or the new Blooms, and we unpacked our standards to those knowledge levels to make sure when we designed our interventions for enrichment, or when we did classroom instruction, we needed teachers to hit that knowledge level target with the reasoning piece. And, of course, it got better over time as students became more fluent in their math skills. And I was just looking at some data from a benchmark in algebra, actually two days ago, at one of our big high schools. And for three to four years, we struggled to get our students to proficiency on our essential standards. We were lucky if we had out of ten, if we had two to three that we could get them all proficient on. Now, this year, for the first time, we're getting them proficient on eight out of the ten and we only have to worry about two. It took us time. I would say it's not a microwave oven. It's a crockpot. It takes time. It's a lot of work. Folks work hard.
Rich: Joe, I'm going to pose one last question before we move on, and that is, how did you deal with the age-old question of time when you were working on developing these assessments and also trying to plan for your re-teach and your enrichment sessions?
Joe: Well, it was hard. There's a lot of things in a master schedule at a school that are protected. We really had to take an honest look at what we were trying to protect. One was—I hate to mention it—we were showing Channel 1 and we were burning 15 minutes a day on it. And it gave us free TV's, but it wasn't really doing much for us instructionally. And when we really looked at the program, we were finding that students were not engaged, and their teachers, they really weren't using it; it was kind of just dead time. We also found some time within our SSR model—remember the old model, silent sustained reading—we were doing a lot of that but really weren't getting the results. And we moved into a balanced reading model we were getting better results from. We still do the SSR but we scaled back on the minutes. So, it's really looking at your master calendar, knowing your school, and re-capturing minutes to find the time to do it. We just—our principals were courageous, and did it, and they found the time and the teachers agreed to do it.
Rich: Well, thank you for presenting that. One last question that's a pretty important one: the whole notion of parent collaboration. What kinds of things did you do to bring your community on board with this?
John: That's a good question. We—at each of our school sites, we have very active site councils, which are actually chaired and run by parents and community members and so all of this was funneled through them and brought them up to speed. One of the things that we have changed as far as our culture is, we now sit down in parent/teacher conferences and go over all the results of the data and the interventions with parents when they come in for their parent/teacher conferences. But, to be quite frank, in the beginning, it was pretty driven by teachers and by us, as far as what we were doing and where we were going. And then, once we began to clarify that piece and process, we were able to get that out. Last year, we created a districtwide statement—we call it our reach [?] statement and it hangs in every room—that outlines all the pieces of our instructional model. And all of our parents get a copy of that, that hangs in our school building and we talk about that a lot so that we have understanding across the board in regards to what we're trying to do instructionally.
Rich: Thank you, Joe and John. At this time, we're going to move on to chat with Merri Grenia. She's a principal of a kindergarten through 6th grade school in rural Vermont and she's been piloting an RTI model of student support for a little over a year now. And she's going to share her thoughts relative to system change, changing roles in professional practice, and all the elements that came into play when you start to implement an RTI model within the classroom and how it affects teachers and administrators. So, we're going to turn this over to Merri at this point. Welcome, Merri. [long pause]
Merri: There's slide 1. As Joe and John, we have been involved with Wolcott Elementary school with professional learning communities as a model for continuous school improvement and we found that it worked pretty well for us, in some sense, in that it gave us a very good structure for developing collaborative teams and so on. We struggled, however, with really operationalizing answers to the three central questions of professional learning communities. And our work with RTI has really given those specific answers, as you see in this first slide. We tend to see research-based curriculum as the answer to what is it that we want students to know in conjunction with the great expectations for our state. Universal screening with follow-up benchmarking and progress monitoring gave us the answer to how will we know if they know it. And research-based intervention gave us an answer to what we will do if they don't.
I should give you a little context for Wolcott Elementary School before we move on. I'm really giving a micro-view as compared to the first two presentations. We are a small school of 135 students. We have a very stable staff and we have had a culture of all students succeeding for many years. We didn't come at this from an intense need base. We have made adequate yearly progress under NCLB every year. We have a 43% poverty rate in our town, so certainly there is a need to take very seriously all strategies that will move kids forward, especially kids from low socio-economic backgrounds. Our trip with RTI really began and has continued with powerful staff development that has involved three-quarters of our professional staff. We volunteered to be an RTI pilot and we were selected as one of five in our state of Vermont. And we had ongoing professional development since January 2006 with folks from the state Department of Education. And we began in our professional development by looking at the components of a successful RTI model and really focused on two main branches. After that, we looked at what does the research say about a successful or a strong reading program? And what schools are out there for monitoring student progress, and then how do we use the data?
Through this process, an interesting thing has happened. Since we focused on reading as our primary focus for RTI, I have been as principal morphing into a reading expert—math and social science is my background—so this has been something that's been different. Our training has been dynamic and this has been a real secret to success I would say for other places looking to move into RTI. As a need developed, we went in that direction, spent less time on things that we felt we already had in place. This professional development that we've had has given us a common set of beliefs, expectations, and, very importantly, common language.
As I mentioned, data-driven decision making was a large part of our professional development time. We did use a Web-based tool, and since somebody has already said the name, I will say it. We did use AIMSweb and we were trained in how to use the literacy or the reading tools and some math tools. When we did the first universal screening, we did have support from the state department. Since that time though, the staff has felt comfortable and has conducted the benchmark assessments and all the progress monitoring throughout the year. This tool has been very popular with teachers because of its efficiency and its effectiveness in moving us forward in terms of targeting interventions for the kids that need them. It's also been very popular with parents. We have not had a formal schoolwide meeting to present this, but as teachers have shared graphs, for example, showing student progress, parents and students, actually, have responded very positively to it. And because we now have this data in a very usable form, it has really moved forward our data-based decision making and our EST, or our Educated Support Team, meeting.
For us, and this is the difference I think from many places implementing RTI, core curriculum has been central to our work. Our special educators, I think, from the beginning, very rightly felt that to qualify students under RTI before special education, based on the fact that they had not responded to a research-based core curriculum, they needed to have some real assurance that in fact that core curriculum was research-based, and that it had been implemented with integrity and with fidelity. And we were fearful in the beginning that we would be using canned programs (I know that question has come up other times this morning); we strongly did not want to do that. We decided that we would use the research of the five components as guidelines for developing a research-based core curriculum and that we would monitor that for fidelity. And everyone on the staff agreed that that should be the principal's job, and it has become thus.
Monitoring for fidelity and integrity is, what I see is the hallmark of what Wolcott Elementary School has to offer to the knowledge base around RTI. When we set out to design a tool to use on integrity and fidelity, we found that one really didn't exist. And so I created one, which is a comprehensive document that includes ________ and approximately an hour and a half per teacher, I've been doing that, and also classroom observation time. And two very powerful things about this process. Number one, it's opened a rich dialogue between myself and individual staff members, but also the staff as a whole, and even as we have been monitoring the program, the program has changed in positive ways. As an example, we found that we had some real gaps in the areas of phonemic awareness and phonics, and as we have gone through the process, we've filled those gaps and we're ready to begin in a very strong place next year in those areas of reading. The other, I think, very positive thing about this process has been the positive assumptions that are built in. So my question to teachers is "tell me how you teach phonemic awareness," not "do you teach it, or do you think you should." This again, I think, has moved us forward. This has definitely not been used as an evaluative tool. It's about program evaluation and improvement, and I would really caution any principal who sees this possible double-dip here, to avoid that, because I think that breaks the trust and would not make the process as powerful as it has been for us.
We're currently piloting a Web-based tool that will give us another source of data about our reading and language arts curriculum, and I'm looking forward to matching the results of that survey up with my findings from the monitoring of the reading curriculum across the school to see what we find. There's been a lot of role re-definition and structural changes in the school because of our work with RTI. And again, many of these had already begun with our work as a professional learning community, but some things I think are worth noting again. My role in classroom is moving from monitoring and program assessment, moving there [to] supervision and evaluation. Certainly, I know those things still need to occur and do occur but there has been a shift in the emphasis. Learning specialists—and I'll just give this example to show how their role is changing—I was invited to a principal discussion of RTI in our state this week and was unable to attend and I felt perfectly comfortable sending the learning specialist to that meeting to represent our school. They're taking a stronger leadership role, they're getting used to using different special education procedures by qualifying students under an RTI model, and they're becoming action researchers as really are all the teachers in our school.
In terms of structural changes, our EST program has changed from three different ESTs to one, partly to give more efficiency and partly because we can. Student progress is reported more frequently and more objectively, and this is something we have seen parents have great appreciation for. Parents appreciate the objective data that is presented to them, and they really appreciate how closely we're watching their children and how frequently we're checking in if there are difficulties. I see—I'm not sure if I should respond to what I see on the message board, but I did see a message that said, "what does EST stand for?" It stands for Educational Support Team, and I'm certain in all states there's something along this line but it's a collection of learning specialists and teachers that do problem-solving around individual student needs.
Next steps. We're far from the top of the mountain in our first 18 months in here. I would say that the primary area that we want to continue to grow in is this EST process. We need more time. And one of the things I didn't mention as I was going through the slides: time is indeed a very valuable resource and we've come up with some creative ways to find it, to make it, so on which I will share if anyone wants it.
We want to have more EST time, partly for a global review, using the ______ just to make sure that the students we're monitoring are indeed doing what they need to do, and then additional EST time for that more intense problem-solving session around students that are still struggling. We find that our interventions in tier 2 are actually out ahead of our reporting of what those interventions are. We have gotten so good at this collaboration business that sometimes additional supports are decided over the copier at 8:00 a.m. and implemented at 10:00 a.m. And we need to make sure that we get a good protocol for reporting those so that there's a paper trail. We want to expand understanding about RTI's philosophy among all stakeholders. We have had an RTI steering committee operating this year, and they did a very nice brochure which we have distributed in limited quantities. We're actually going to have a back-to-school night, and that's one of the things that we want to go through in each classroom. We want to standardize procedures for who should be progress monitored. Teachers are having so much fun with it that they've essentially monitored their whole class every week on reading fluency. We realize that's a little bit overboard, and we want to streamline that a bit. And we have now done our first full qualification of the students in special education using the RTI model, but we want to continue to tighten up our protocols and understanding, and we're in the process of doing that. So that's the Wolcott story. I'm a cheerleader for the model but I think if you talk to any of the members on our staff, you would find strong support as well. It's something that has worked well for us and we are eager to share our success to help our model grow. Thanks.
Rich: Well, thank you, Merri. There's a couple of specific questions for you. One is, you alluded to the fact that you've adopted a second Web-based instrument to help inform progress. People are wondering what the name of that instrument is.
Merri: It is SEC On-line, Surveys of Enacted Curriculum. It's a very comprehensive survey. It comes out of the University of Wisconsin, I believe. It takes about one and half hours for a teacher, and there is a professional development that's required before you can begin it. One of the things that's really helpful about that tool is that it really delves into the level of cognitive demand of different teaching activities that teachers have.
Rich: A second question was, when you're engaged in your integrity and fidelity work with your classroom teachers, people are wondering how many visits you might make to a classroom before you are able to complete your entire document.
Merri: At least two. This is based on the fact that I'm in every room every day in some fashion. So through the interviews, the teacher and I are able to arrive at some particular thing that I would want to look at more intently than perhaps I had in the past. But at least two, and hopefully, three. Approximately one and a half to two hours of observation. The same amount of time as an interview.
Rich: A related question is, how did you come upon, or how did you know that the programs or the instruction you're observing is research-based?
Merri: Well, good question. This year as part of our staff development, that was a major component of the training. Janna Osmen, who works with the state department and is well versed in the reading research, did training with all of us on that. As a principal who never read a book about reading prior to the last 18 months, I've read about six and several articles. So, I really am using the synthesis of the research as the basis for designing the document. So I'm matching what I hear from teachers and what I see in the classroom against that research.
Rich: And one last question for you. People are wondering how your Title I services and your RTI model integrate or inter-relate.
Merri: We are a schoolwide Title I school, so we have a lot of freedom in terms of how we use Title I services. But we are doing some neat things with our Title I folks that I want to mention specifically. First of all, they do work with individuals and small groups, sometimes in Tier 1, frankly, sometimes in Tier 2. We also adjusted the time of our Title I teachers this year to give them part of Friday off and to spend a half hour a day in our after-school program time so that they're providing Tier 2 to different students there through tutoring. One of our Title I teachers has a strength in technology and she's actually helping us manage all of the technology pieces to keep the system running smoothly.
Rich: I think we need to move on to our last slide. I want to thank our three presenters who did a wonderful job and also the great questions we received from folks. [technical difficulties]
Carol Keirstead: This is Carol Keirstead of the New England Center. While Rich is throwing the ball back to himself, just to thank all of our presenters for such a wonderful array of information and we're only scratching the surface. I will say that there is a great deal of interest at the federal level in thinking about the intersection of Title I, OESE funds and OSEP funds, special education, and elementary and secondary education funds to support RTI. RTI right now doesn't sort of have a home as do other funding streams, so there's a lot of conversation at the federal level about how all of these programs can work together to support RTI. I just wanted to put that out there for information.
Rich: Well, thank you again to our three presenters, who did an excellent job who in a short period of time trying to talk about a pretty complex intervention. Thank you to all of our participants and your great questions.
Carol: Before we say goodbye, I'd just like to let you know that we will be sending a survey to collect a little feedback about the session and also to gauge your interest in any future work that we might support to help you get information about RTI or other things that we can do on your behalf. Look for that and we would appreciate you filling that out in a timely way and we will do what we can to provide some future support. Thanks again and we appreciate your time.