As the school year begins, opportunities for creative scheduling present themselves. While much of the planning for how to deliver differentiated services takes place in the spring and is refined over the summer months, there are always situations that need fine tuning as the year unfolds. The RtI Action Network has a current blog regarding this topic that you might be interested in reading. The link to this blog is located on the right side of my blog page.
27 Jul 10
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Speaking of “creative scheduling”, we’d love to hear your responses to our current thinking: We have 3 interventionists, and 3 1-2 combo. class instructors. We also have a high percentage of yellow and red-zone readers. So…our data team, A.I.D. (for Assessment, Intervetion and Data) came up with a plan to strategically support our students. For the first 40 minutes of our almost 120 minute literacy block, we’re flooding with interventions. We used Dibels, SIPPS, and DRA@ (including word analysis) to place students in 1 of 6 different intervention groups. Since we have 6 licensed teachers, each will lead one of these strategic intervetion groups. Most groups will target remediation at appropriate leves, but we also have two levels of extention groups to push our on-target and high-achieving students. Are we crazy to think this could impact our students positively, or are we scattering 1st graders like so many seeds in the wind? The idea is that we six instructors will meet monthly to share intervention strategies, strategies that can be reinforced during core instruction. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
I don’t think you are crazy, but you are being creative! The most important thing you will want to do is to progress monitor students to determine if this way of providing intervention is getting you the results that you want for them as a group and individually. Another reminder is to use this data to be flexibile in providing supports to these students. That means that the way you have things set up has to allow students to move in and out of groups based on collected data. I am glad to hear that you have planned ahead for collaborative meeting time with the six instructors, but make sure that part of that time is secured for data review and adjusting of groups. One other thing to keep on the forefront of your discussions is making sure that regardless of what type of intervention a student is receiving, that he/she is getting high level instruction directly related to the literacy standards. It might be worthwhile to go through each of the interventions and have a conversation about how they are directly impacting the curriculum standards so you can identify any potential gaps.