The Whispering Teacher

If you are a parent or teacher within the United States, you have likely heard the new buzz words “Response to Intervention” or RTI.  Over the past few years, conversation about how students qualify for special education has ensued.    Many students tested for special education did not qualify for a learning disability despite the fact that they were performing significantly below grade level in the classroom.  As a result, RTI was initiated and the way we identified children with learning disabilities changed. It is important to be educated in the new process, especially if you work with, or are the parent of,  a struggling learner.

Before you can fully understand how RTI will be used to identify students, it is important to understand past practices when identifying students for special education.  When students are referred to special education, standardized testing is completed to further investigate their capabilities and weaknesses.  Until recently, in order for a student to qualify for a learning disability, a discrepancy model was used.  A student would be given achievement tests to look at a their performance with academic activities and an intelligence test to look at cognitive abilities (the way they think and processes information).  If a discrepancy existed, one or more of the academic areas would score about 2 years behind where their cognitive ability suggested they would score.  These cutoff scores were provided by the government and PPT teams were required to follow these guidelines.  Personally, I have been involved in PPTs, using the discrepancy model, where I was shocked that a child did not qualify for special education.  It is extremely hard to explain to a parent that “Yes, your child is unable to perform on grade level despite all the interventions the teacher has tried, but they do not have a learning disability”.  The baffled and disheartened looks on parents’ faces mirrored my own confusion.  The question then remained, if these students don’t have a learning disability, then why are they struggling so much?  Do they have a disability that is not being shown through the standardized testing?  Is the classroom teacher differentiating enough for this student?  Is the teacher using programs that are scientifically proven to improve the learning of struggling students?  All these questions led to one glaring problem … the identification process for students with learning disabilities was flawed.

After a lot of thought and planning, a new identification process, called Response to Intervention, was developed.  This process starts when a struggling student is identified and brought to the attention of a team of teachers.  The team then reviews the child’s progress and creates a goal for this student.  They discuss the scientifically research based program that will be used to achieve the goal, and the measurement tools that will be used to determine student progress.  Once the team adjourns, the intervention will be carried out with the student over a pre-determined amount of time as data is collected.  This data will provide as a progress monitoring tool.  (It is important to note that it is good teaching practice to include parents in these meetings.  Also, data should be sent home to parents as it is collected to keep them apprised of their child’s progress)  The team will then reconvene to review the child’s data.  If the child made progress, then the intervention is working and the child most likely does not present with a learning disability.  If the child, however, did not make adequate progress, the team will then refer the child for special education.  Standardized testing will be completed in the usual fashion to obtain valuable information about how the student learns, but these scores alone do not determine if a child has a learning disability or not.  The data collected during the RTI process can be used to determine eligibility.

This process is still quite new for schools, so it is important to be patient as they work out the kinks, however, if my child were a struggling learner, I would demand that this process be followed.  While many teachers are excellent and effective, we all know that there are some teachers out there that do not teach in a variety of ways, despite the abundant amount of research that supports teaching to different learning styles.  Following the RTI process forces teachers to try different, scientifically research based instruction methods before labeling a student as special education.  RTI also helps to eliminate the feeling that students are “falling through the cracks”.  The PPT is now given more flexibility in the way that they identify learning disabilities.  Personally, I feel as if RTI will help teams to more effectively identify students with a learning disability and provide them with the supports and supplemental instruction that they need in order to be successful.