Action Research Report
Template
Abstract
or Executive Summary
Completion pending
data to be collected analyzed and added at the culmination of this project.
Title
and Author
Reducing
the Number of Students Referred for Additional Evaluation in RTI
By
Melissa Hickman
Introduction
/ Background (Section One)
My campus is Moore Elementary in the Pasadena Independent
School District. It is a PK-4 campus
with a bilingual class at each grade level, as well as a pull out ESL classroom,
which serves grades K-4. We are a Title
I funded campus with 55% of our student population labeled at-risk. My role on
our campus is Peer Facilitator/ Instructional Coach. I assist the teachers with the implementation
of the district’s ELA curriculum. I also serve on our campus’ IAT team.
Due to the glaring need for an overhaul of my campus’ RTI
process, my Action Research Project was born. Year after year, my campus’ RTI
meetings were being flooded with requests by teachers to have more and more
students referred for full evaluations by our district diagnosticians. Time after time they would kick them back due
to lack of documentation of classroom interventions. It became apparent that
teachers were not following through and documenting interventions that had been
discussed at our quarterly RTI meetings.
In an effort to reduce the number of students being referred
on to the district diagnosticians for full evaluations, I envisioned arming
teachers with the tools and skills necessary to meet the needs of their
intervention students in their own classroom.
My goal was to have teachers address the needs of these students on the
front lines, in their classroom in hopes of reducing the number of Tier I and
Tier II students who were being referred on for full evaluations. In addition
interventions outside of the classroom would also be documented. They would
also be given the tools they needed to implement and track these interventions.
This project fundamentally is designed to make sure that we
are meeting the needs of at-risk and below level students on our campus. During
our RTI process there is much overlap between our special education students,
speech students, 504 students, Dyslexia students as well as the rest of our
student population. During our intervention
process we take into account home life, behavior issues, experiences at
previous schools and the need for counseling.
I would like to think that our IAT team prides itself on covering all of
the bases and looking at each student’s situations from a myriad of
angles. The improvements that we are
making to our campus’ RTI process based on my Action Research Plan are only
strengthening these qualities.
Literature
Review (Section Two)
Upon
reviewing the article by Dexter and Hughes entitled “Progress Monitoring Within
A Response-to-Intervention Model” on the www.rtinetwork.org
website, I discovered research based reasoning on the importance of having a
clearly laid out RTI process. It became
more apparent that there was a need for clear-cut guidelines on how the RTI
process should be implemented on my campus. As stated in a n article by Mellard
found on the www.greatschools .org website, “implementation of RTI will
only work when school staff integrate RTI as part of their vision for educating
children, and for their roles and responsibilities as professionals”. In discussing this problem with my principal,
assistant principal, school counselor, and other members of my campus’ IAT
team, it was decided that action needed to be taken in order to improve our RTI
process. The idea for an RTI binder was
realized where teachers would document and track student intervention in an
organized manner to be reviewed by the IAT team during our quarterly meetings.
Action
Research Design (Section Three)
Subjects
The target population
for this project is every student in grades PK – 4 that are in need of
classroom interventions through the RTI process. Additionally I must include
teachers in my target population, as they will be the ones carrying out student
interventions in their classrooms.
Prior to our initial RTI meetings with each teacher at the
beginning of the school year, the counselor and myself visited with each
team. During this meeting we discussed
the need for additional documentation on our RTI students and evidence of
interventions being implemented in the classroom. We also discussed that we wanted to make the
process less stressful for the teachers by arming them with everything they
needed to be successful with intervention in the classroom and if the need
arose, the evidence they needed to show that it was not working.
I initially organized the purchasing of the RTI binders
using campus funds through my school secretary.
The counselor and I researched, selected and created the forms that we
wanted to include in the binder and how exactly we wanted it set up. Teachers were instructed on how to manage and
complete the binders and the responsibility of completing them fell solely on
them. The IAT Team including myself sat down with each teacher at our quarterly
RTI meetings to review the contents of the binders. The implementation of the
binders and the intervention tracking forms were put into place to insure that
students were receiving the help that they needed in the classroom, first and
foremost.
With the support from my principal, I was allowed to place
the responsibility of accurately adhering to the process of implementing and
documenting classroom intervention to the teachers. I would act as a support to
assist them in any way that I could during this process, as well as overseeing
the project as a whole. The IAT team
would also assist me in reviewing that the process was being carried out
properly by the teachers during our quarterly RTI meetings. Initially this project was met with some
conflict by the teachers, stating that it was only adding more work for
them. I quickly addressed these issues,
citing the stricter guidelines that the district had placed on the referral
process for intervention students in need of full evaluations. I explained that in order to truly get
students the help they needed, we had to make sure that we were doing
everything we could for them in the classroom and on our campus.
Data Collection
Data will be
collected, analyzed, and added as it becomes available. This data will be
compromised of the number of students in the various Tiers of the RTI process.
To analyze if this project is successful, we will compare them to numbers of
the past and hope to see a significant decrease, with the largest decrease
being in the category of students referred for additional evaluations by the
district.
Findings
(Section Four)
Findings will be
collected, analyzed, and added as they become available.
Conclusions
and Recommendations (Section Five)
This project has promoted a positive school
culture in addressing the concern that all students are receiving the
appropriate interventions in the classroom to insure that they are
successful. Time and effort is being
taken to implement and monitor the addressing and meeting of each students
needs on an individualized basis.
As the project has been implemented, teachers
have been positive about the effect that it is having in their classrooms. As we have met for our RTI meetings
throughout the year, teachers have noted that it is making the intervention
process easier to carry out by having all of their tools in one place, as well
as having a clear cut plan on how to carry the interventions out with each
student. During our quarterly RTI
meetings it has made it easy for the committee to see which students are having
success with their interventions and which students are continuing to struggle.
At the culmination of this project I hope to
realize what is effective in making the RTI process on my campus
successful. Through student performance
and teacher feedback we will continue to modify and adjust the guidelines and
procedures to best meet the needs of the teachers and students on our campus,
while at the same time fulfilling the district and state requirements for
intervention implementation in the classroom. I will share my findings with
district personnel who might incorporate into our district curriculum and share
it with other teachers throughout the district.
In the future I will be recommending
additional staff development and trainings for teachers on how to successfully
carry out interventions in their classrooms.
These may be held at the campus or district level. The trainings may include information on how
to come up with effective interventions, how and when to offer these
interventions to students, and tools on how to monitor the success of these
interventions.
References
(Final Section)
Dexter, D. and Hughes, C. (2012). Progress Monitoring Within
A Response –to-Intervention Model. RTI Action Network. Retrieved from http://www.rtinetwork.org/
Jones, D. (2010). RTI in Elementary Schools. Louisiana
Department of Education. Retrieved from http://www.doe.state.la.us/
Mellard, D. (2011) Responsiveness to Intervention &
Implementation in Schools. Great Schools. Retrieved from http://www.greatschools.org/
Mellard, D., McKnight, M. & Deshler, D. (2007) The ABCs
of RTI. National Research Center of Disabilities. Retrieved from http://www.nrcld.org/
Stevens, S. (2006). Response to Intervention (RTI) Really
Terrific Instruction. RSD Louisiana. Retrieved from http://rsdla.net/
Tackett, K. Baker, S. & Scammacca, N. (2009)
Implementing Response to Intervention: Practices & Perspectives from Five
Schools. Center on Instruction. Retrieved from http://www.centeroninstruction.org/
