A Lifeline to Success

Lynn Allen

As educators, we want our schools and classrooms to be engaging, challenging, and rewarding environments where all our students will learn and thrive. In most cases, students enter school with interest, excitement, and a desire to learn. As time goes on, school is typically associated with feelings of growth, competence, and accomplishment. For some students, however, school becomes a place where feelings of disillusionment, disappointment, and frustration are predominant, especially when they are struggling to learn and not keeping pace with their peers.

Intervention Versus Remediation

Although educators have always attempted to assist students who have difficulty learning, they have frequently relied on remedial approaches that provide students with individual or small-group, skill-building instruction taught by specialists outside the classroom setting. In some cases, students have needed to be classified as having disabilities to access certain types of remedial assistance. Although not without merit, such attempts to help have often reinforced students' feelings of incompetence, removed them from classroom learning experiences, and alienated them from their peers.

In recent years, educators have begun to employ a new approach, called Response to Intervention (RTI), to address students' learning needs. This initiative is designed to help educators identify struggling students early and provide appropriate instructional interventions, resulting in more chances for success and less need for special education services.

RTI enables educators to systematically assess all students using a progressive series of data collection tools. Then, for students who are not learning, they can swiftly respond with fluid, tiered levels of research-based interventions based on individual plans. For struggling students, such an approach can mean more than passing tests and getting good grades on report cards: it has the potential to become a lifeline to success.

Breaking the Cycle of Failure

In 2008, school officials in Westchester County, N.Y., embarked on a quest to use data to improve their students' academic and behavioral progress. Many students had repeatedly failed in traditional school settings and, as a result, had large gaps in their learning. In an effort to address the unique needs of these students more effectively—and in hopes of promoting their successful transitions to less restrictive programs or a return to their residential school districts—a committee of teachers, literacy specialists, school psychologists, related service providers, and administrators engaged in a one-year assessment review process with the ultimate goal of implementing an RTI approach. More important, the committee represented an entire school community of educators committed to changing the course of their students' educational experiences for the better.

The assessment review committee met to work on their charge almost every week during the 2008-09 school year. They soon realized that staff members were administering an overabundance of assessments and that there was no plan in place to determine what, when, and why assessments were given and no means of sharing assessment findings to address students' learning needs. As a result, and as part of the ongoing assessment review process, the committee developed a three-tiered system of academic and clinical supports that included entrance and exit criteria based on selected assessment tools: screeners, progress-monitoring tools, benchmarking tools, and annual achievement tests.

Academic Levels of Support

Clinical Levels of Support

Commitment to Success

Beginning in the 2009–2010 school year, the schools' administrators and several of the assessment review committee members presented the RTI plan to implement the academic and clinical levels of support to the entire school community. It was evident that they were passionate about the plan and believed that it would significantly improve the growth and development of their students.

Since the committee completed its assessment review process, they and several other teachers and staff members formed the new School-Wide Assessment Team (SWAT). Their purpose is to provide leadership, assist with implementing the levels of support, and train teachers and staff members to collect and analyze data.

Primarily due to the SWAT's efforts and the continued support from building- and district-level administration, it is now quite common to hear teachers reflect on how they've changed—in ways they never could have imagined—the manner in which they approach their work. In just a few short months, they have developed a new philosophy of approaching struggling students and have a common language in which to discuss students' needs with each other, parents, and school district personnel. Although the RTI implementation is still evolving, these educators enthusiastically talk about how their data-supported responses to newly implemented interventions are beginning to affect their instruction in a positive way, thereby improving student achievement.

The implementation of any new initiative does not come without challenges, but the members of this school community have found RTI to be a viable, effective approach to meeting the needs of their students. In addition, they are embracing a new culture of teaching and learning as well as a newfound collective responsibility for their students' academic and behavioral progress. RTI has truly become a lifeline to the success of this school and to its students, many of whom once believed that all hope was gone.

Lynn M. Allen is assistant director of special education and the Guidance and Child Study Center at Putnam/Northern Westchester Board of Cooperative Educational Services in Westchester County, N.Y.

ASCD Express, Vol. 5, No. 15. Copyright 2010 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.