How to Screw Up Student Learning Under RtI

RtI is used to help determine if a student might be suffering from reading/learning disabilities. The reason that student would be referred for intervention support would be because of some concern about the student’s daily progress.

Consequently, we ADD a targeted intervention to the teaching the student is receiving in order to determine whether it promotes greater progress.

If you use the intervention to replace regular instruction then that student would not receive a more intensive and extensive learning experience than what was already provided. All you would be doing is just trading one treatment for another. Not the idea of RtI and not an approach that has been successful in raising reading achievement.

Using the brief intervention to interrupt or replace the longer classroom instruction means that you won’t find out if the student would respond to the extra tuition, because no extra teaching is offered.

Big mistake to pull kids out of their classroom instruction for an intervention unless it has already been determined that they child requires a special education placement (in other words, the student hadn’t responded to the regular teaching plus the intervention). However, even special education programs—depending on how serious the learning problem—may be used as additional teaching rather than replacement teaching.

I definitely side with you in this. I think your principal is making a big mistake—both undermining kids’ learning progress and making it impossible to determine whether the student has a learning problem.