Best Practices at Tier 1 [Secondary]. Gayle Gregory
![Best Practices at Tier 1 [Secondary] - Gayle Gregory](limg_read679455.jpg "Best Practices at Tier 1 [Secondary] - Gayle Gregory")
staff development specialist and gifted education program director. For her work in the San Francisco Bay area, Martha was awarded the Mason-McDuffie Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award.
She has written several books, including Begin With the Brain: Orchestrating the Learner-Centered Classroom, Teachers, Change Your Bait! Brain-Compatible Differentiated Instruction, and Think Big, Start Small.
She earned a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University and a master’s degree in human behavior from City University.
To learn more about Martha’s work, visit her website Begin With the Brain (www.beginwiththebrain.com).
Mike Mattos is an internationally recognized author, presenter, and practitioner who specializes in uniting teachers, administrators, and support staff to transform schools by implementing response to intervention and professional learning communities. Mike cocreated 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. Additionally, he is an architect of the PLC at Work model. 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 Dr. Richard DuFour chose to be featured 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.
To learn more about Mike Mattos’s work, follow @mikemattos65 on Twitter.
To book Gayle Gregory, Martha Kaufeldt, or Mike Mattos for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
As educational practitioners, authors, and consultants who have dedicated their careers to the professional advancement of educators, we know this to be true: response to intervention (RTI) is our best hope in providing every student with the additional time and support needed to succeed in school. The research and evidence supporting our claim is both comprehensive and compelling. In perhaps the most extensive study of the factors that impact student learning, John Hattie’s (2012) meta-analysis, based on over eighty thousand studies and one hundred million students worldwide, finds that RTI ranks second in the most effective influences, inside or outside of school, that can increase student performance. When implemented well, RTI has the power to help students improve multiple grade levels in a year (Hattie, 2012). Imagine for a moment the practical ramifications of these findings.
While these ideas may sound unrealistically optimistic, they aren’t. The research we describe in this book is not reporting theory or results achieved under the ideal teaching conditions of a generously funded experimental program. We have had the honor of working with schools implementing RTI across all fifty states in the United States, every province in Canada, and many countries throughout the world. From Alabama to Australia and South Dakota to Singapore, we have seen these results firsthand in real-life schools facing diverse student needs, limited resources, restrictive contractual agreements, and challenging governmental regulations. At a time when success in school is no longer optional for economic and social stability, RTI provides the ongoing processes necessary to ensure every student learns at high levels.
Understanding Response to Intervention
RTI’s underlying premise is that schools provide timely, targeted, systematic support early, rather than delaying help until students fall far enough behind to qualify for special education (Buffum, Mattos, & Weber, 2012). Commonly referred to as a multitiered system of support (MTSS), the three tiers of RTI traditionally take the shape of a pyramid, with each tier representing a different level of support based on student needs. See figure I.1.
Figure I.1: Traditional RTI pyramid.
Tier 1 of the RTI model represents a school’s core instructional program, in which all students receive effective instruction on grade-level essential curriculum. While Tier 1 should meet most students’ needs a majority of the time, invariably some students will need a little extra help to succeed in core instruction. This is the primary purpose of Tier 2—to provide timely, targeted supplemental academic and behavioral interventions to ensure that those students also succeed in mastering their essential grade-level curriculum. For students who enter the school year with significant deficits in reading, writing, number sense, English, and academic or social behaviors, Tier 3 supports provide intensive academic and behavioral remediation in these foundational skills.
The goal of the RTI approach isn’t to move students from one tier to another; instead, RTI provides supplemental and intensive support in addition to core instruction. This approach recognizes that students who miss core instruction on essential grade-level standards in order to receive interventions are unlikely to catch up. This is because while these students receive interventions on previous learning outcomes, they miss the teaching of new content critical to future success—the proverbial “one step forward, two steps back.” With the RTI approach, however, the most at-risk students receive effective Tier 1 core instruction on grade-level essential standards, Tier 2 supplemental support in meeting these critical outcomes, and Tier 3 intensive instruction on foundational skills that the students should have mastered years ago. Collectively, these three tiers ensure that all students end the school year with the essential skills and knowledge they need to succeed the following year and beyond.
When RTI is viewed this way, one point becomes very clear: the entire RTI process is built on effective, grade-level core instruction. The foundation of a successful system of interventions is effective initial teaching (Shapiro, n.d.).
Recognizing Unrealized Potential
While federal law has promoted response to intervention since the reauthorization of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) in 2004, most schools and districts are struggling to secure the student achievement results that RTI is proven to provide. Many states, districts, and schools mistakenly view RTI primarily as a new process to qualify students for special education, with the tiers serving merely as new hoops