Taking Action. Austin Buffum
today. He later led Capistrano’s K–12 instructional program on an increasingly collaborative path toward operating as a PLC. During this process, thirty-seven of the district’s schools were designated California Distinguished Schools, and eleven received National Blue Ribbon recognition.
Austin is coauthor with Suzette Lovely of Generations at School: Building an Age-Friendly Learning Community. He has also coauthored Uniting Academic and Behavior Interventions: Solving the Skill or Will Dilemma; It’s About Time: Planning Interventions and Extensions in Elementary School; It’s About Time: Planning Interventions and Extensions in Secondary School; Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles; and Pyramid Response to Intervention: RTI, Professional Learning Communities, and How to Respond When Kids Don’t Learn.
A graduate of the University of Southern California, Austin earned a bachelor of music degree and received a master of education degree with honors. He holds a doctor of education degree from Nova Southeastern University.
To learn more about Austin’s work, follow him @agbuffum on Twitter.
Mike Mattos is an internationally recognized author, presenter, and practitioner who specializes in uniting teachers, administrators, and support staff to transform schools by implementing the response to intervention and PLC processes. Mike co-created the RTI at Work model, which builds on the foundation of the PLC at Work process by using team structures and a focus on learning, collaboration, and results to drive successful outcomes and creating a systematic, multitiered system of supports to ensure high levels of learning for all students.
He is former principal of Marjorie Veeh Elementary School and Pioneer Middle School in California. At both schools, Mike helped create powerful PLCs, improving learning for all students. In 2004, Marjorie Veeh, an elementary school with a large population of youth at risk, won the California Distinguished School and National Title I Achieving School awards.
A National Blue Ribbon School, Pioneer is among only thirteen schools in the United States that the GE Foundation selected as a Best-Practice Partner and is one of eight schools that Richard DuFour chose to feature in the video series The Power of Professional Learning Communities at Work: Bringing the Big Ideas to Life. Based on standardized test scores, Pioneer ranks among the top 1 percent of California secondary schools and, in 2009 and 2011, was named Orange County’s top middle school. For his leadership, Mike was named the Orange County Middle School Administrator of the Year by the Association of California School Administrators.
Mike has coauthored many other books focused on response to intervention (RTI) and professional learning communities (PLCs), including Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work; Concise Answers to Frequently Asked Questions About Professional Learning Communities at Work; Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles; Pyramid Response to Intervention: RTI, Professional Learning Communities, and How to Respond When Kids Don’t Learn; Uniting Academic and Behavior Interventions: Solving the Skill or Will Dilemma; It’s About Time: Planning Interventions and Extensions in Secondary School; It’s About Time: Planning Interventions and Extensions in Elementary School; Best Practices at Tier 1: Daily Differentiation for Effective Instruction, Secondary; Best Practices at Tier 1: Daily Differentiation for Effective Instruction, Elementary; and The Collaborative Administrator: Working Together as a Professional Learning Community.
To learn more about Mike’s work, visit AllThingsPLC (www.allthingsplc.info) and http://mattos.info/welcome.html, or follow him @mikemattos65 on Twitter.
Janet Malone has thirty-five years of experience in public schools, including two years in rural Australia. She spent most of her public school career in the Poway Unified School District in southern California, where she retired as the director of professional development. A former teacher, teacher coach, principal, and central office administrator, Janet was able to meet the interests and needs of teachers, administrators, and support staff alike on topics ranging from assessment and effective grading to professional learning communities to team building, and more.
In retirement, Janet has presented at conferences, conducted professional workshops, and consulted with school districts throughout North America. Most recently, she has worked closely with Austin Buffum and Mike Mattos to co-create both the content of RTI at Work and the design of RTI at Work professional development offerings. Based on her range of experiences, she has made contributions to assessment, collaborative teamwork, leadership development, and facilitation of adult learning.
From her first teaching job to the leadership she demonstrates currently, Janet has always kept her focus on student learning. She passionately believes that in order for students to learn at their highest levels, the adults who serve them must be learning too.
To book Austin Buffum, Mike Mattos, or Janet Malone for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity—it is a prerequisite.
—Barack Obama
This book is about doing the right work. Success in school is the factor that most directly predicts the length and quality of students’ lives. A student that fails to succeed in our K–12 system is three times more likely to be unemployed, sixty-three times more likely to be incarcerated, and on average, lives at least a decade shorter than a college graduate (Breslow, 2012; Tavernise, 2012). Like any other professionals who make life-altering decisions on behalf of those they serve, educators have a professional and ethical obligation to utilize practices proven to best ensure every student succeeds. The very definition of profession is a vocation that requires specialized training in the practices deemed most effective in the field (“profession,” n.d.). When a preponderance of evidence proves that a particular process, protocol, or procedure is most effective, professionals are not merely invited to use it, but instead are expected to conform to these technical and ethical standards.
When it comes to how educators should respond when students struggle in school, the research and evidence in our field have never been more conclusive—response to intervention (RTI) is the right way to intervene. Also known as a multitiered system of supports (MTSS), RTI is a systematic process to ensure every student receives:
The additional time and support needed to learn at high levels. RTI’s underlying premise is that schools should not delay providing help for struggling students until they fall far enough behind to qualify for special education, but instead should provide timely, targeted, systematic interventions to all students who demonstrate the need. (Buffum, Mattos, & Weber, 2012, p. xiii)
Traditionally, the RTI process is represented in the shape of a pyramid (see figure I.1).
Source: Buffum et al., 2012.
FIGURE I.1: Traditional RTI pyramid.
The pyramid is commonly separated into tiers: Tier 1 represents core instruction, Tier 2 represents supplemental interventions, and Tier 3 represents intensive student supports. The pyramid is wide at the bottom to represent the instruction that all students receive. As students demonstrate the need for additional support, they receive increasingly more targeted and intensive help. Because timely supplemental interventions should address most student needs when they are first emerging, fewer students fall significantly below grade level and require the intensive services Tier 3 offers, creating