RTI at Work™ Plan Book. Austin Buffum

support to extend student learning, providing benefits to all students.

      Based on his meta-analysis of more than eighty thousand studies relating to the factors inside and outside of school that impact student learning, researcher John Hattie finds that RTI ranks in the top-five educational practices proven to best increase student achievement. When implemented well, RTI has an exceptional average yearly impact rate of 1.27 standard deviation (Hattie, 2009). This deviation (often referred to as effect size) measures the efficacy of an intervention or change in practice relative to taking no interventive action at all. To put this number in perspective, consider the following.

      ▶ A 1.0 standard deviation increase is typically associated with advancing student achievement two to three years (Hattie, 2009).

      ▶ Based on longitudinal studies, the yearly typical impact rate of a classroom teacher’s instruction ranges between 0.15 and 0.40 standard deviation growth (Hattie, 2009). This means a school that successfully implements RTI leverages a process that is considerably more effective than a school that leaves it up to individual, isolated teachers to meet students’ instructional needs.

      ▶ The greatest home or environmental factor that impacts student learning is a family’s economic status. Students who come from more affluent homes—defined as middle class or higher—gain a yearly academic benefit of 0.57 standard deviation growth per year (Hattie, 2009). RTI’s impact rate is more than twice as powerful as what some students might receive at home each night.

      At a time in which failure in the K–12 system has lifelong implications for students, successfully harnessing the proven impact of RTI is critical for educators truly committed to ensuring every student succeeds.

      We call our process RTI at Work because the guiding principles of the PLC at Work process form the foundation of our intervention recommendations. So, our best hope to help that single teacher with struggling students in want of effective interventions is to ensure that each teacher is part of a high-performing team within a school functioning as a PLC that is also committed to RTI practices.

      Because ensuring every student’s success requires effective teaching and high levels of collaboration, we designed this plan book to support both instructional practices and collaboration. While most plan books guide the individual classroom teacher in instructional decisions, this RTI at Work Plan Book also guides the collaborative team planning and processes essential to schools that operate as PLCs. Most important, this plan book calls on teachers to go far beyond the traditional questions of teaching to a relentless focus on learning—for both students and educators.

      To get the most out of this resource, it is important to have a clear understanding of RTI, PLC at Work, and how teacher teams drive both processes. To that end, the first part of the RTI at Work Plan Book contains an overview of the big ideas that shape RTI at Work, cultural shifts you should expect in a PLC, and keys to building high-performing collaborative teams. It also includes forms to help you work with your team more effectively as well as the standard forms you need to collect and organize information about your students and your classes. You can also visit go.SolutionTree.com/RTIatWork to access additional online resources. The second part includes forty weeks of planning pages with text and activities to inform, inspire, and challenge you and your teammates as you implement RTI at Work. You’ll also learn from other schools and districts that have embarked on the same work. The third part provides references and resources for further study.

       ABOUT THE AUTHORS

      Austin Buffum, EdD, has more than forty-five years of experience in public schools. His many roles include serving as former senior deputy superintendent of the Capistrano Unified School District in California.

      Mike Mattos is an internationally recognized author, presenter, and practitioner who specializes in uniting teachers, administrators, and support staff to transform schools by implementing RTI and PLCs.

      To book Austin Buffum or Mike Mattos for professional development, contact [email protected].

       PART ONE

      TOOLS AND PROTOCOLS

       Response to Intervention Simplified

      After working with hundreds of schools and districts around the world, we have found the use of lots of RTI jargon, but a general lack of specificity on what the terminology means. To counteract this, we have carefully rethought and revised the traditional RTI pyramid. We refer to our visual framework as the RTI at Work pyramid.

      At first glance, you probably noticed that our pyramid is upside-down. This is because we have found that some educators misinterpret the traditional RTI pyramid as a new way to qualify students for special education. States, provinces, and school districts visually reinforce this conclusion when they place special education at the top of the pyramid. To challenge this detrimental view of the traditional pyramid, we intentionally inverted the RTI at Work pyramid, visually focusing a school’s interventions on a single point—the individual student.

      Source: Buffum, Mattos, and Malone, 2018.

      In the RTI at Work pyramid, the widest part of the pyramid represents the school’s core instruction program. The purpose of this tier—Tier 1—is to provide all students access to essential grade-level curriculum and effective initial teaching.

      As we state in our most comprehensive book on RTI, Taking Action (Buffum, Mattos, & Malone, 2018):

      Many traditional RTI approaches advocate that the key to Tier 1 is effective first instruction. We don’t disagree with this, but this teaching must include instruction on the skills, knowledge, and behaviors that a student must acquire during the current year to be prepared for the following year. Unfortunately, many schools deem their most at-risk students incapable of learning grade-level curriculum, so they pull out these students and place them in Tier 3 interventions that replace core instruction with remedial coursework. So, even if the initial teaching is done well, if a student’s core instruction is focused on below-grade-level standards, then he or she will learn well below grade level.

      If the fundamental purpose of RTI is to ensure all students learn at high levels—grade level or better each year—then we must teach students at grade level. Every student might not leave each school year having mastered every grade-level standard, but he or she must master the learning outcomes deemed indispensable for future success. (pp. 20–21)

      There will be a point in every unit of study when most students have learned the unit’s essential learning outcomes, and the teacher will need to move on to the next unit of study. But because some students may not have yet mastered the essential curriculum by the end of the unit, the school must dedicate time to provide these students additional support to master this essential grade-level curriculum without missing critical new core instruction. This supplemental help to master grade-level curriculum is the purpose of the second tier—Tier 2.

      This is a critical point! Traditional RTI approaches often define Tier 2 by either the size of the intervention group or the duration of the intervention. These recommendations are based primarily on early RTI research focused on primary reading interventions. In our experience,