Response to Intervention

Why Response to Intervention (RTI)? Enhancing Outcomes for All Students
Jack Fletcher
University of Houston

Dr. Jack M. Fletcher of the University of Houston presented an outstanding presentation on one of the hottest topics in Special Education today, Response to Intervention (RTI).

Some interesting points for me...

Although Joe Torgensen was able to improved accuaracy and comprehension in an 8-week intensive (2 hours per day) phonologically-based summer program, he was not able to increase fluency. Why? Because fluency increases because of practice and children who are struggling to decode every few words don't enjoy reading, so they don't read. They don't get the practice they need to improve their fluency.

Early intervention works. We can cut our at-risk to 2-10% in K-2, but we need small group (3-4 kids) in a Tier 2 supplemental pull-out intervention. (We should be proud at Chets Creek because this is exactly what we have done with universal screening through DIBELS and then K-1 Reading Mastery intervention. Unfortunately we have NOT figured out how to do this in addition to our core instruction!)

Tier 3 intensive intervention should be with 1-3 kids at a time for 45-50 minutes a day. (How can our Special Education teachers at Chets continue to provide this when the county is suggesting that we cut from 8 to 5 Special Education teachers next year?)

Because IQ does not matter in the type of intervention that you plan for LD students, then there is no need for the type of IQ testing we have been doing. With RIT we would switch instead to academic evaluations (Again, Chets should be proud of its Target Team because this is exactly what they are stessing. We are so far ahead in this new RTI model!)

Everything you ever wanted to know about Progress Monitoring can be found at http://www.studentprogress.org/.

Dr. Fletcher's website

With the author's permission, Dr. Fletcher's PowerPoint is shared below.

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