Brittni Kilpatrick

Practicum Project RTI co-facilitator

Reason for Project

Education is continuously changing in an attempt to help more students reach academic

benchmarks set throughout his or her academic career. One new approach to reaching
underperforming students is Response to Instruction and Intervention, more frequently called
RTI. This is a wide spread effort to identify underperforming students quickly and early. These
students identified will complete multiple tiers of intervention that are intended to accelerate
student progress and move students into the on target range. Currently, RTI is a three tier system
that teachers and interventionists are working to implement. Students that continue to show a
lack of growth would progress through the tiers that would ultimately end in exceptional
education referrals and exceptional education services. Ideally, through this system, students
will cease to be identified for exceptional education by a gap in student achievement scores and
intelligence scores; instead they will begin to be identified based off of a lack of progress in
reading and/or math regardless of intensive intervention.
Literacy in United States public schools is a well-known challenge. There is a high rate
of students that leave elementary schools unable to read well enough to pass high school and
college courses. The significance of this issue speaks for itself. Elementary schools need to
make every student a proficient reader. Therefore, there has to be continuous research on the
interventions, curriculums, and strategies being used to address this issue. Student learning is
too vital to determine years down the road that an unsuccessful program was being used on
students. Currently, RTI is the program model being implemented across the country to bridge

the gap between the underperforming students and the proficient students. This program model
must be closely studied to ensure it is doing the job that it was created to do. Is it bringing the
underperforming readers to grade level? If so, is it catching students up in a timely manner?
The state of Tennessee has planned that elementary schools will implement a 3 tiered
model of RTI during the school year 2014-2015 in order to be in compliance with a federal
mandate. Middle and high schools will begin implementing the model the following year.
Therefore, the elementary school that I work for has begun the RTI implementation under a state
and federal mandate. This coincides with our school improvement plan because it will contribute
to raising literacy and math scores in kindergarten through fifth grade.
Specific Goals Aligned to Standards

- Create urgency for raising student achievement.

1.1 Candidates understand and can collaboratively develop, articulate, implement, and steward a
shared vision of learning for a school.

- Ensure all classrooms are using the RTI model.

2.1 Candidates understand and can sustain a school culture and instructional program conducive
to student learning through collaboration, trust, and a personalized learning environment with
high expectations for students.

- Organize student interventions kindergarten through 5th grade to track data and progress.
6.3 Candidates understand and can anticipate and assess emerging trends and initiatives in order
to adapt school-based leadership strategies.
Summary of Implementation

This year, I was asked to assist school administration with the implementation of Response to
Intervention (RTI). The implementation was for all general education classrooms kindergarten
through fifth grade. I served as a co-facilitator of RTI and the RTI committee. This experience
has taught me a great deal about federal mandates, initiating change, and being flexible.
The RTI committee was made up of numerous staff members to ensure equal representation
from each group in the school. There was a teacher from each grade level, exceptional education
teacher, ESOL teacher, speech-language therapist, school psychologist, and assistant principal.
With the new RTI model, exceptional education referrals are handled very differently. Before
teachers would refer a student that they were concerned about to the exceptional education team.
They would determine whether the student needed to be tested for a learning disability or not.
With the new model, the RTI committee makes the referral for testing. A teacher with concerns
about a student brings the concerns to the RTI committee. The committee looks through the RTI
data of progress monitoring and fidelity logs to determine if adequate intervention has been used
with the student. The committee then determines whether the student is making adequate
progress or if a referral for exceptional education testing is needed.
Before the school year began, we met as an RTI committee and discussed the upcoming
implementation. We listed concerns and challenges that we could foresee. Unfortunately, we did
not identify the correct areas of concern. We were concerned about time in the schedule and
additional personnel. To meet those needs, additional interventionists were hired and a Walk to
Read approach was adopted to help with scheduling. In this approach, students from a grade
level are grouped into tiers, and at a certain time in the day, the students move into one classroom
for tier two, another classroom for tier three, and a third classroom for exceptional education
services. The tier two classrooms would offer small group instruction and differentiate

instruction to meet the groups, and the tier three classrooms would be assisted by interventionists
and exceptional education staff to form small intensive groups (Calendar, 2012, p.11).
The first step for the RTI process is the universal screener. This is an assessment that all
students take that shows their levels of achievement in reading and math. This was the first
struggle of our RTI implementation. At the conclusion of the previous year, we were told
through central office that the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI) as the universal screener.
Throughout the summer, I researched information on this assessment to be prepared to help
others use it effectively. Instead, we found out the week before school began that we would be
giving the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP). With little professional development offered
on this assessment, no one was prepared to use the data well. We learned shortcuts. If a student
had a score below 25%, they were placed in tier 2, and below 10%, they were placed in tier 3.
This assessment did not provide any additional information or insight because we were not
prepared to understand the assessment or data.
Using the MAP data, teachers worked in grade levels to create RTI tiered groups. Each
grade level chair sent the data and grouping to me, and I organized the groups into spreadsheets
to help track grouping. I shared the spreadsheets throughout the year with administration. An
issue that arose from this data was a conceptual misunderstanding of the purpose of RTI. Most
grade levels grouped all of their students according to the data and used every teacher available
to target students intensively. A couple of grade levels did not comply with this idea. They tried
to limit their numbers of students who qualified for RTI in order to have interventionists teach
the groups instead of teachers.

I think this was a result of a lack of training. I took it for

granted that the majority of my understanding of RTI came through my undergraduate

coursework and additional professional development that I had been sent to. Many were
unfamiliar with the big ideas behind RTI and just saw it as something else to do.
The big idea that I feel more professional development would have been needed for was
the purpose of RTI. In the Journal of Learning Disabilities, Denton explains that RTI has the
ability to prevent learning disabilities. Many students begin to struggle to read in the early years
of education; therefore, they choose not to practice or work on reading. This creates a larger gap
as they fall farther behind during the intermediate grades. Eventually, these students will be
referred for a learning disability. Denton (2012) explains, If the performance gap between
typically developing readers and students at risk for reading difficulties is addressed aggressively
in the early stages of reading acquisition, more serious reading problems may be prevented
(p.233).
The next struggle that occurred during the RTI implementation was keeping up with the
changes that came from above. The main purpose of RTI is that students are progress monitored
frequently, and the scores are charted to determine if students are making adequate progress or
not. Students that make insufficient progress despite intervention would be candidates for
exceptional education testing for a learning disability. Teachers began progress monitoring
students and tracing growth using assessments provided by the county. At the middle of October,
our school psychologist began informing teachers that the progress monitoring tool was
insufficient, and could not be used. Teachers were using running records, and she needed
numerical data. Teachers became upset that they were being told their work was void. I met
with the psychologist to help better understand the issue. It turned out that the school
psychologists were being told different guidelines of RTI than administrators and teachers were
being given. She chose a progress monitoring tool that could be used, and this resource was

shared with classroom teachers. Unfortunately this change posed a huge challenge to teachers.
According to RTI, students need to be progress monitored nine weeks through tier 2 intervention
and if needed, moved to tier 3 for nine weeks and progress monitored before a referral to the RTI
committee. Therefore, with the change in assessment tools all the previous data was void, and all
students began being monitored in December. This made it very challenging for any students to
be referred in time for testing to be done in this school year.
Most of my time as RTI facilitator was spent trying to determine the guidelines for RTI.
It was not clearly laid out, and it was a rocky implementation.
Data

Grade Level

# Students in
RTI in October

# Students in RTI
in March

K
1
2
3
4
5

32
25
35
25
26
21

10
20
22
18
16
21

# Students
Moved Out of
RTI throughout
the Year
22
9
5
7
8
0

% Students
Moved Out of
RTI
68%
36%
14%
28%
31%
0%

Accomplishments

I felt the biggest accomplishment through this year was that RTI is up and running in our
school. There are a lot of areas of growth especially as the state department and county school
system determine more of the specifics of the RTI model. However, it will be much easier to
adapt to these changes now that RTI is part of the schools daily schedule and teacher
expectations.

Reflection

This was one of the more complicated projects that I have ever worked on. I gained a
deeper understanding of the challenges leaders face in education. It is very challenging to
implement something when you fill that you do not have all the pieces. We worked to implement
RTI, but we were learning more details as the year went on. I am glad I have had this experience
because it has offered me insight into managing top down mandates.
The strengths that I noticed through this process were the use of an RTI committee that
was made up of representatives from every grade level and special area. This allowed every
department to have a voice and to help with promoting buy-in amongst their group. Another
strength was promoting data based decision making through the staff for RTI. All instructional
decisions for RTI were made using recent progress monitoring data. This data determined
whether intervention was adequate or needed to be increased, new teaching strategies needed to
be used, or if exceptional education services would benefit the student. This mentality of
teachers was a great improvement to instruction, and for that reason many students were moved
to grade level by midyear. I would predict that with a couple of years of RTI a much lower
percentage of students will be performing below grade level.
In hindsight, there are several things that I would have done differently to try to make the
RTI process more clear and effective. I was under the impression that teachers were more
informed of the purpose and details of RTI. The county has been transitioning to the change into
RTI for the last several years, but the professional developments that had been presented on RTI
had not been attended by all the staff. Different departments had been informed differently
throughout different county sessions. There turned out to be various levels of knowledge on

RTI, and this created problems. People were spreading false information about RTI because they
were not adequately informed. I could have avoided this problem by distributing a questionnaire
or survey at the beginning of the year to understand what the staff knew about RTI and what
needed to be discussed in professional development sessions. In order to ensure everyone was on
the same page, there should have been a faculty meeting offered and question and answer session
to clear up confusion to try to ensure that everyone was on the same page.
Throughout this year, I have learned many things. The first is that there are many
additional challenges to implementing a change when the change is coming from the top down.
When I envisioned implementing change, I thought of the principal having full control of the
situation, but that was untrue in this situation. Several times we had to change what we were
doing in our building because we were out of compliance because of a new change in the RTI
protocol either from the state or county level. This led to additional confusion and frustration
throughout staff.
I have learned that in a situation such as this, you have to be able to be transparent and
admit that you do not have all the answers. You have to be supportive to staff during these times
of confusion. The last thing that I learned is that you have to be patient with change. Change
does not come over night.

Work Cited

Callender, W. A. (2012). Why Principals Should Adopt Schoolwide RTI. Principal, 91(4), 8-12.
Retrieved from http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.utc.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?
vid=40&sid=c916148e-b5af-4f47-ae01-46524b6303ee%40sessionmgr111&hid=113
Denton, C. A. (2012). Response to Intervention for Reading Difficulties in the Primary Grades:
Some Answers and Lingering Questions. Journal Of Learning Disabilities, 45(3), 232243. DOI: 10.1177/0022219412552155