Matt Burns, PhD, from the University of Minnesota gave a presentation on “Using Data to Navigate the Ocean of Interventions”. As you all know, there are MANY interventions available on the market. He ascertains that it is critical to individualize the intervention for each student and to stray from “one stop intervention”. For example, use MAP, MCA, or TOSCRF scores to identify students who need interventions. From those who need interventions, provide additional testing to identify specific areas (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocab/comprehension). Then, if a student needs support in Fluency, to select a research-based program that focuses on Fluency. Likewise, if a student needs support on comprehension to select a research-based program that focuses on developing comprehension.
Dr.Vicki Weinberg from the Department of Education also gave a brief session on “Multi-tiered Systems of Support”. She talked about how to change the system of assessments, interventions and practices to better meet the needs of all students. She focused on how sometimes there are pools of money from different areas (Title I, ELL, Special Ed) and often, in many districts, it is practice to exclude certain students from certain interventions because of these pools of money (he/she can’t enroll in the reading support class because he/she is already getting special ed services). She offered the idea to first identify the needs of the students, then to identify the staff’s capacity to meet those needs regardless of job title or label (i.e. if there is a staff member who is stellar at reading interventions, he/she should administer interventions to whomever needs reading interventions). I will be the first to admit, that I have NO IDEA how funding works in our district with regards to this topic but the presentation really made me reflect on how we best meet the needs of our students regardless of which category they may fall into and the idea of better aligning our interventions based on the identified needs and not “robbing Peter to pay Paul” (she used that quote a few times).
Questions I walked away from the conference with:
- What does intervention look like in Shakopee schools?
- How does it support all students regardless of labels/categories?
- How do we offer interventions systematically across schools?
- And, as we grow into a larger district, how to do we ensure all staff (especially the intervention/reading specialists) are on the same page with the process of offering interventions?
So many big questions are in front of us and even bigger opportunities for growth and change.
You bring up some interesting points Shawna!! When I look at those questions, I see both room for growth and a lot of possibility. As a member of the RTI team at the high shcool, I have been struggling with how to incorporate interventions at this level. There doesn't seem to be a clear picture of what is being done at the other buildings, which I think would help as these interventions need to be universal in our distrcit (or at least documented similarly!)
ReplyDeleteI think using professional development time and vertical team time to explore these questions would be beneficial. We have such a great staff at the high shcool and I know we can come up with some solutions!
Every time I talk with educators from other districts and interventions come up, most are astonished at the systematic interventions we do at the middle school level here in Shakopee. I agree there are definitely places where we can become more effective in meeting the needs of more students regardless of labels, but we definitely have some good things in place! It will be interesting to see how intervetions play out at all the different secondary buildings next year from the sixth-grade center all they way up through the high school.
ReplyDeleteBetsy,
ReplyDeleteI am glad to hear that things are going well in the middle school. What are some of the interventions that you do there? How did you get teachers to buy into the process? We are trying to do RTI at the high school and it has been difficult to get "rolling." It would be great to hear some of your ideas!
Marguerite:
ReplyDeleteWe do a wide variety of interventions; teacher buy-in isn't always there, but it helps that we have time scheduled INTO our days once every-other-week during study hall hour to meet with our Student Support team and discuss students, possible interventions and intervention progress. It is less of something to buy into and more something that is part of every-day life.