I've heard from a variety of our school district customers that they are interested in Response to Intervention, or RTI for short. The basic premise of RTI seems to be that a teacher can utilize formative assessment data in such a way as to apply interventions when gaps are identified, monitor the student's response to the intervention (thus the name), and determine what to do next based on additional data. The whole process is designed to provide rapid deployment of interventions and the evaluation of these interventions in a tight timeframe. The purpose of RTI is to catch gaps before they grow into serious learning problems, and to avoid having to channel students through special education programs who may not have diagnosable learning disabilities.
Here are a couple of good resources to learn more about Response to Intervention as an instructional strategy:
At Learning.com, we're trying to utilize technology in such a way that normal teachers can individualize instruction for every student. It seems to me that the RTI framework has a similar goal, albeit ostensibly focused on the needs of students demonstrating gaps in their knowledge and skills.
I wonder if the RTI framework, or a similar mechanism of data-driven decision making, could be applied to a broader population of students. Obviously students with severe learning disabilities need to be addressed in a way most appropriate for their particular situation. But what about students performing roughly at level? Or students designated as TAG students?
For example, if students are performing above benchmark for their age or grade level, perhaps an RTI-like evaluation could adjust the benchmark upward until the student is demonstrating a gap that can be addressed in an RTI-style intervention.
It seems that the primary difficulty in facilitating this type of approach would be a philosophical one: do we want students to continue progressing at their own pace through the above-grade-level standards? This seems like the right kind of problem to have, and is not that different from the conundrum of how to address talented and gifted students that the education system has wrestled with for decades.
Of course, from my perspective, it seems entirely desireable to allow children to go as far as they can, as fast as they can in any direction that seems right for them. Students who could utilize video games to learn math skills, or focused research to master aspects of history, etc. should be encouraged to do so, and the school system should never run out of things to engage that student.
Also, the technology to monitor student performance and behaviors with instructional experiences is here. The correct utilization of technology would facilitate not only the collection of such data, but also the evaluation of responses to a wide variety of interventions throughout a large population of students. With such rich data available, responses to intervention could be more and more accurately predicted, the cost (in labor, money and emotion) could be minimized to keep students on track and moving toward goals that are meaningful to them and to their teachers and parents too.
The technology could be effectively deployed to give teachers the at-a-glance info they need to know where all of their students are at any given moment. This would facilitate the possibility of essentially managing 25-30 kids on individualized learning tracks without going crazy.
If the technology can do it, it will be done eventually. It's just a matter of figuring out who, where and when.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment