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CHAPTER 1

OPENING DOORS FOR ALL LEARNERS

Doors allow entrance. Entrance in this case means access to knowledge, which in turn translates to greater lifelong opportunities for students. If the academic core knowledge is to reach all students, then teachers must honor diversity with prescriptive and cohesive instructional frameworks. Oral expression, listening comprehension, reading fluency, reading comprehension, written expression, vocabulary development, and mathematics computations and applications are all skills that open doors for future strides. Students enter these doors through primary, secondary, and tertiary entry points, known as tiers in the RTI process. The lessons in this chapter offer literacy, mathematics, and behavioral examples that allow teachers to embrace RTI so that doors are open to all students to achieve. Figure 1.1 (page 10) illustrates the structure of this chapter.

Teachers must honor diversity with prescriptive and cohesive instructional frameworks.

RTI Variables

A variable is considered an element or a factor that is subject to change. Variables are not always as clear cut and identifiable as the ones in a mathematical equation, such as solving for the variable of x in 5x = 20. However, as with this linear equation, RTI involves knowing how to isolate variables to figure out the solution. When teachers collaboratively problem solve, they can identify and isolate RTI variables. RTI’s academic and behavioral equations require looking at variables that include learner performance levels and the discrete steps of required tasks. Teachers analyze these variables to determine which academic and behavioral skills require introduction, reinforcement, reteaching, and maintenance. Administrators, teachers, students, and families are ultimately the human variables who continually collaborate to support interventions.

Two of the most important RTI variables include classroom dynamics and teacher expertise, which we explore in the following sections.

Figure 1.1: Plan for opening doors for all learners.

Administrators, teachers, students, and families are ultimately the human variables who continually collaborate to support interventions.

Classroom Dynamics

Planning student-specific, multitiered instruction is one way teachers positively influence classroom dynamics. Classroom dynamics include physical ones, such as the lighting, seating, and available resources, but emotional classroom dynamics are more important. These dynamics include setting up a classroom to value students as individuals within an accepting, trusting, and emotionally safe learning environment. Classroom dynamics value diverse interventions and multiple entry points for students at their instructional levels. Delivery should not frustrate students with learning that is too difficult or not within their prior knowledge base.

Just as navigation has several tools designed to increase movement, administrators should provide teachers with RTI supports, tools, and resources. This includes time to collaboratively plan, assess, tweak, and reflect on instruction.

Some students require additional instruction to hone skills with letter-sound correspondence, phoneme segmentation, fluency, word definitions, contextual clues, reading comprehension, mathematical practices, and behavior. Letters, words, sentences, numbers, shapes, motivation, attention, and good study skills are building blocks that allow students to understand, own, and apply concepts.

Teachers who realize that each student possesses different skill sets value not only the curriculum but also the student diversity present in every classroom. Depending on students’ skill sets, teachers must adapt. Classroom dynamics affect the structured interactions between students and teachers.

Successful educators need to know their subjects. Subject knowledge goes beyond the content to knowing students as the most closely studied subjects. This includes knowing student backgrounds and interests. The first day of school is generally the first time we are introduced to our students, but the days that precede that encounter offer valuable instructional data. Each student brings his or her own backpack packed with strengths, weaknesses, and many prior home, school, and life experiences that shape him or her. This includes exposure or lack of exposure to vocabulary through conversation, reading, and real-world and multimedia experiences.

Successful educators need to know their subjects.

Students do not come to us as clean slates. Most students come to us with positive and negative academic, social, emotional, and behavioral experiences. These events comprise the baseline core academic and behavioral levels we must identify. As students enter each grade from preschool to high school, we learn to recognize the many scripts that precede that first day of school.

When teachers communicate and students believe that they are malleable and able to learn the core knowledge, additional progress occurs, despite the challenges presented. Successful academic outcomes are influenced by resiliency and the belief that change is possible (Yeagar & Dweck, 2012). Positive mindsets influence academic achievements. Some students have uphill journeys to achieve the core knowledge, but that is when teachers collaboratively provide the appropriate scaffolding to help students succeed, despite their learning, behavioral, emotional, social, communicative, sensory, or physical differences. In modern classrooms, diversity is the norm. In turn, multiple engagements and personalized learning experiences with tiered instruction also must be the norm.

Everyone has a backstory, but students are more likely to achieve success when teachers plan for, prepare, and deliver solid instruction, positive attitudes, and multiple curriculum entry points. This includes motivating lesson plans that offer diverse, step-by-step interventions for the whole class, small groups, and individual students. Lesson objectives must honor the academic core knowledge and also the class dynamics of the teacher’s audience—a diverse cast of characters known as students.

Teacher Expertise

Programs do not teach, but teachers do. Teacher expertise begins at the early stage of preservice at the university level and continually expands in school settings. A teacher’s development and expertise never stagnate. Universal screening and progress monitoring yield the appropriate selection of interventions for core instruction, but teachers need to make effective choices to honor an alternate way to identify students who need more intensive instruction or intervention (Wehman, 2013).

Programs do not teach, but teachers do.

After appropriate screening, teachers plan how abstract concepts are solidified in students’ working memories. Teachers must introduce and then reinforce concepts. The strategies they use go beyond direct instruction to involve cooperative learning and developing collaborative partnerships with other teachers, intervention specialists, instructional leaders, families, and students.

However, before any instruction occurs, teachers must conduct accurate assessment. According to William Bender (2012), “Assessment tools in the differentiated class should be selected by the teacher to specifically target discrete skills on which a student is struggling” (p. 111). Teachers must be able to identify the skills with which students need more assistance, and then choose the appropriate, evidence-based materials to implement Tier 2 and 3 interventions.

Teachers should use RTI as a vehicle, with formative assessments in the front seat to guide instructional decisions and interventions. They offer students assistance in RTI tiers, but it is important to note that the interventions are not exclusively teacher owned; students must learn to own their strategies. Once teachers determine that interventions are effective, they can modify and adapt them based on the data from both formal and informal assessments. Some students may need increased interventions, while some may require decreased interventions as time goes on. If students continually master the core curriculum, then teachers should be cognizant of how interventions are helping, not enabling, students.

Evidence-Based Practice

RTI includes evidence-based practices, but there is no universal definition for RTI based on a one-size-fits-all approach, since one size basically fits none. Although teachers often use evidence-based literacy and mathematics resources as part of the interventions, RTI is not a neatly packaged program (Scanlon, 2013); the multitiered levels structure classroom instruction. The following sections describe the basic tenets of RTI: cohesive framework, prescriptive and responsive instruction, and contextually engaging tasks.

Cohesive Framework

The RTI framework is cohesive, multitiered, and research based. Cohesiveness includes organization and structure. Core instruction, student-specific interventions, screening instruments, progress monitoring, and data analysis are integral to RTI (Gersten & Vaughn, 2009). Progress monitoring includes estimating rates of student improvement and identifying adequate student progress. When implemented with fidelity, RTI improves instructional quality to increase students’ chance of school success as they move on to postsecondary choices in colleges and careers (McInerney & Elledge, 2013).

Teachers make data-based decisions regarding using supplementary intervention for students who do not respond to the core instruction delivered in Tier 1. The teacher delivers the core in whole-class, small-group, and individual instruction. Basically, educators deliver core instruction in the continuum of support shown in figure 1.2. This inverted pyramid demonstrates educators’ collective responsibility for student learning by schoolwide teams and collaborative teacher teams. As noted, Tier 1 can also be referred to as primary instruction, Tier 2 as secondary instruction, and Tier 3 as tertiary instruction.

Prescriptive and Responsive Instruction

RTI is a prescriptive and responsive way to address student skill levels and needs. For many years, special education was the antithesis to the philosophy that one size fits all, some, or even most. But now, differentiated instruction supports all students in inclusive settings (Tomlinson, 1999). Ableism cannot replace individualization, nor should students be viewed from a deficit paradigm (Fierros, 2006). Prescriptive instruction acknowledges and responds to different abilities with tiered levels that occur in mixed-ability classrooms (Karten, 2015; Tomlinson, 1999). Fidelity to the programs teachers select is essential, but teachers also need to acknowledge that students do not fit into neatly wrapped packages. RTI is not a path to special educational services but a way to infuse good teaching practices that strengthen those areas in which students need improvement.

Source: Buffum et al., 2012.

Figure 1.2: Team responsibilities in the inverted RTI pyramid.

Buffum and colleagues (2012) write:

In the RTI process, schools do not delay in providing help for struggling students until they fall far enough behind to qualify for special education, but instead provide targeted and systematic interventions to all students as soon as they demonstrate need…. Some schools mistakenly view RTI as merely a new way to qualify at-risk students for special education and focus on trying a few token general education interventions before referring struggling students for traditional special education testing and placement. (pp. 1–2)

Just as a doctor prescribes medicine in the right dosage with a policy of “do no harm,” teachers must select interventions that consider benefits versus the risks with scrutiny and respect for learner autonomy (Knott & Harding, 2014). Evidence-based RTI considers the amount and length of tiered interventions with quantity and quality as well as the teachers’ and students’ integrity. In this context, integrity includes fidelity to evidence-based strategies and interventions that honor learner diversity.

Tier 2 usually occurs over a period of about two months, while Tier 3 may have a longer and more intensive duration. For example, Tier 2 may occur over a period of ten weeks as opposed to twenty weeks for Tier 3 (Sanford, Harlacher, & Walker, 2010). These time frames are not standardized, since the length of tier instruction is responsive to learner progress. Appropriate student information in response to the multitiered interventions informs decisions and ultimately drives positive outcomes.

Contextually Engaging Tasks

Academic and behavioral tasks exist within the context of the core curriculum, but more important, within the context of real life. Student learning becomes more meaningful when students engage in context-related tasks with accompanying remediation and enrichment. RTI’s evidence-based systematic interventions focus on student needs, but when these interventions are contextually based, teachers can establish relevancy for students. Real-world connections link concepts to learner interests to increase time on task and student buy-in with the motivation to learn more.

The following are examples of skills taught within contextually engaging tasks.

➢ Oral expression: Students cooperatively organize notes in small groups of three to five peers as they deliver a class presentation. Topics include a favorite family celebration, best day in school, or a difficult task accomplished.

➢ Listening comprehension: Students receive background information before viewing a clip from a popular movie or television show. They take notes with guided questions in a cloze structure in which they fill in key concepts to guide their listening.

➢ Reading fluency: Students read jokes and riddles with classmates before creating and presenting mathematics, science, and social studies jokes based on the vocabulary they are studying. The teacher shares a video with examples and nonexamples of fluency with expression, pausing, phrasing, and inflection with choral modeling, and offers instruction, feedback, and guidance to smaller groups and individual students.

➢ Reading comprehension: After students receive refreshers on specific types of reading comprehension questions (for example, main idea, sequencing, and so on), they form groups of three to four. Then each group selects a specific fairy tale, fable, or nonfiction article to analyze and writes comprehension questions to exchange with another cooperative group. Afterward, the groups discuss the reading comprehension skills gained with the teacher and the class.

➢ Vocabulary development: Students highlight a list of vocabulary words as they follow along on copies of lyrics from curriculum-related hip-hop videos from Flocabulary (www.flocabulary.com); for example, “The Week in Rap,” “Geography,” “Ancient History,” and “Internet Safety.”

➢ Written expression: Students write on topics that interest them (for example, fashion, NASCAR racing, soccer, dolphins, or beaded wrap bracelets). They use multiple scaffolding tools, such as transitional word lists, sensory words, online visual dictionaries, glossaries, writing frames, and technology tools.

➢ Mathematical computations and applications: Students complete engaging activities (for example, measuring ingredients for a recipe, figuring out the batting average of a baseball player, recording the average weekly and monthly temperatures) to learn reasoning.

Multiple Curriculum Entry Points

English philosopher Herbert Spencer (Brainy Quote, n.d.) wrote: “The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.” Even though teachers arrange instructional activities to increase student knowledge, both the students and teachers are active learners. Teachers learn about their students as they note progress with multitiered interventions. In The Student-Centered Classroom, author Leo Jones (2007) writes:

The teacher’s role is more that of a facilitator than instructor; the students are active participants in the learning process. The teacher helps to guide the students, manage their activities, and direct their learning. Being a teacher means helping people to learn; and, in a student-centered class, the teacher is a member of the class as a participant in the learning process. (p. 2)

That’s where multiple curriculum entry points come in.

Successful Strategies and Mindsets

Successful strategies and mindsets allow for scaffolding, guiding, compacting, and reinforcing the core curriculum to connect to individual learner skill sets. The main goal of RTI is for all students to achieve. Buffum and colleagues (2012) assert: “Response to intervention (RTI) is our best hope to provide every child with the additional time and support needed to learn at high levels” (p. xiii).

Each RTI tier exemplifies that strategic teaching honors student ownership and hones skills with phonemic awareness and fluency; comprehension of fiction, narrative, and expository text; mathematics computations and concepts; and real-life applications of literacy and mathematics. Teachers with mindsets that hold high expectations for all students never marginalize either the concepts or student potential.

Teachers with mindsets that hold high expectations for all students never marginalize either the concepts or student potential.

MTSS Lesson Connections

The following literacy and mathematics scenarios are examples of multitiered responsive interventions that embrace RTI’s tiered instruction. The lessons offer a glimpse into the RTI process in action. They invite teachers to connect tiered interventions to their own grade levels, disciplines, and students, and to consider the collaborative staff roles and who is responsible for interventions for the whole class, small groups, and individual learners. As teachers plan literacy and mathematics units, they must honor student-centered instruction with an eye on increasing listening skills, fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary, written expression, oral expression, and critical thinking skills.

Literacy Scenario

This scenario takes place in a fourth-grade language arts lesson. For Tier 1, students read Cynthia Lord’s (2008) book Rules. The book depicts the themes of differences and accepting others through exploring the relationship between two siblings, the main characters. Catherine’s brother, David, has autism. Students search the book for text-based evidence in response to written questions, explore character traits, and write a book report. During core instruction, students participate in read-alouds, guided practice, and buddy reads. The teacher offers students characterization graphic organizers where students can record their thoughts, along with writing frames to assist with the book reports.

The teacher offers students who easily grasp the concepts nonfiction articles on autism to review and summarize and present their findings to the class. They compare and contrast the knowledge from the nonfiction autism resources to how Lord presents David. Some students in core instruction write a literary review of the novel, others act out scenes from the novel, and some create storyboards with hand-drawn or digitally created visuals.

For Tier 2, a few students receive literacy instruction in small groups in addition to the core instruction. These students require daily assistance to better understand how to interpret the text to identify the characters’ appearances, actions, and thoughts. Students elaborate on the rules, such as explaining why a boy takes off his shirt to swim, but not his shorts; why no toys are allowed in the fish tank; and why late does not mean you are not coming. The tiered instruction offers students increased chances to discuss the plot, answer inferential questions, and practice and apply new vocabulary.

Some students need additional assistance with written expression and receive more intensive, small-group instruction on how to write a cohesive book report with a beginning, middle, and end that cites text-based evidence. This occurs during Tier 3 instruction. A few students receive additional scaffolding by listening to a digital version of the book on Audible (www.audible.com) so they can hear the correct fluency and pronunciation modeled. This allows students the opportunity to access the text to answer the comprehension questions and write the book report. Students receive mini reading and writing lessons to sequence and understand the events. With guidance, they independently and collaboratively complete Rules activity sheets (www.cynthialord.com/pdf/rules_worksheets.pdf).

Mathematics Scenario

This scenario takes place in a tenth-grade geometry class. The teacher introduces geometric models of theorems and mathematics vocabulary, and students learn to solve a complex geometric theorem. However, all students in the class do not grasp the concepts at identical speeds.

During Tier 1 instruction, students receive step-by-step procedures, engage in mathematics journaling, participate in think-alouds, and have access to manipulatives. In Tier 2, some students require small-group instruction, practice circle theorem applications, and receive instruction to strengthen weaker computational skills. These students have extended opportunities to practice the geometry skills with daily progress monitoring.

In Tier 3, a few students need more assistance to identify shapes within other shapes, since they are missing essential prior knowledge with many skill gaps about chords, diameters, arcs, and congruency. Another small group of students requires enrichment activities instead of repetition. The teacher prepares materials for learning centers and invites students to cooperatively explore them. Pattern blocks, pegboards, compasses, rulers, solid 3-D shapes, and virtual manipulatives are available for additional student exploration, reinforcement, and enrichment. The teacher offers instruction in tiers, giving students time to practice, refine, and own the skills and concepts.

Conclusion

Teachers must continually synthesize and tweak the instructional routes they choose based on the data—student progress. Chapter 1 began this journey. Literacy and mathematics navigation requires inviting classroom dynamics where all students can learn in an accessible, nonthreatening environment as well as teacher expertise in delivering a multitiered system of supports. G. Rexlin Jose (2015) frames the learning conversation and guides the way as we continue to navigate the core curriculum: “Vocabulary is the gateway to knowledge that unlocks the doors of sublime ideas to the readers” (p. 7).

Chapter 2 follows with an exploration of the academic language—the core vocabulary.