Response to Intervention Report

Nichole Thompson
The student I chose is a 16-year-old, African American, male. He distracted
himself from Performing Arts class during transition times and occasionally during class
activities. He walked around the classroom picking up objects to mess around with,
which distracted his classmates. The classroom atmosphere is open to movement by the
students, but his movement was excessive and unnecessary to the tasks at hand. He
participated in activities that required physical action, but only mentally engaged
himself when he wanted to.
The intervention I used for him was three-fold. I made sure that there were
activities that allowed him to get up and move as long as it was constructive towards the
activity instead of meandering around the room. When there were not physical
activities, he was allowed to move around the room as long as he was not distracting to
the other students. When he did sit, his chair was to be placed next to the teachers desk.
The last point of the plan was to move objects that he was partial to grabbing, out of
sight.
The student was monitored during class. The number of distractions he caused
were counted each day.

Everything planned for this behavioral RTI worked in decreasing the number of
distractions in class. The only part of the plan that did not always work was to move the
objects he would grab out of sight. This became difficult to do because the objects that

he would play with were objects that needed to be stored in the classroom for the
musical production the class was helping to construct. Luckily, the student became
focused on the tasks for the play and was not distracted as often by everything in the
room. There were some unanticipated elements to this Response to Intervention. The
student became aware of the disruptions he was causing and started to implement selfcorrective techniques. This could have been a result of the reminders and talks the
teachers would give him about his class contributions. I speculate that it was also a
result of the removal of specific students from the class at the turn of the semester. The
last outside factor to his self-improvement is his decisions on who to spend time with
outside of school. He began to socialize with students who were more focused on
academics, so those principles may have affected his desire to constructively contribute
during class. What I learned from this experience is that the student has to want to
become a better student before progress can be made. If he or she is set on being
disruptive and has no desire to be helpful, then there is nothing that you can do to get
them to be cooperative. This does not mean that a teacher should not try to give RTIs.
The goal teachers should have with students who need a behavioral or academic RTI is
to first give them a reason as to why it would be better to change their behavior. This
sounds simple, but creating a desire for learning in each individual student is a task that
teachers will constantly have to work at because every person is different! In this case,
the student was inspired by his friends, and by my cooperating teacher and I, to
cultivate the talent he has for performing arts and used it to be a positive leader among
his classmates.