Response to Instruction

 It's that time of year, when the kid talks and problem solving teams start getting together. This year, my team started last month. It was not as bad as I imagined--it always helps when teachers come to these meetings ready to talk and with current, relevant data in hand. This is a challenge when in between benchmarks.  My team gets together for kid talks (the first step) every four weeks with follow up every six.

This is where the team helps the classroom teacher, create a SMART goal that they will monitor until the follow up. How did we get to this place? Well, it was lots and lots of clean up last year and building capacity with data collection. The team spent last year tackling the students who never seemed to leave RTI--either they went through the special education or made progress to be on par with their classmates and were sent back to tier 1. 

One thing that the team and our building has embraced is collecting the data and doing something with it. As teachers we are swimming in data and many time it either sits and gathers dust or it's used to drive instruction. Using it is what makes students grow--no mater where they start. For example I have a students no has many bad habits including talking when not their turn or off topic, not attending to the task at hand or the details. She wears you down to where you can no longer keep up and give in. Over the last three years she has grown little but using the data showed that she had been getting the intervention. This year, I focused the intervention to comprehension and decoding strategies. In the six weeks, she has started to attend to the details while she reads. She rereads and reads for meaning. (HEY) These are firsts.

The success that she has had has drive conversations with her teacher and our ELL Resource teacher.  We have aligned our instruction to focus on a couple of targets and not worrying about everything she needs to do. And yes it's a very long list as a fifth grader. I have hope that these early successes will drive her to herself and take a more active role beyond self monitoring. Without data, I would be doing the same tier three that she'd been for the last two years.

I created a document that has helped me keep track of the goals and data for students no matter what tier they are in. I hope you find it useful--I know my student look forward to weekly progress monitoring and seeing their growth. Have a great week.








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Welcome to my all thing special education blog. I empower busy elementary special education teachers to use best practice strategies to achieve a data and evidence driven classroom community by sharing easy to use, engaging, unique approaches to small group reading and math. Thanks for Hopping By.
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