Response to Intervention: Improving Achievement for all Children

Posted by Beth DuBose on Sep 23, 2008

RTI webinar presented by District Administration

Today I attended the RTI webinar that District Administration conducted and we sponsored. The speakers for the webinar had some of the highest credentials I have seen for any RTI webinar that I have come across: Alexa Posny, Kansas Commissioner of Education and former Director of the Office of Special Education at the US Department of Ed; Mark Shinn,  Professor of School Psychology, National Louis University, Skokie, IL; and Christy Chambers, past president of the Council of Administrators of Special Education (CASE). There were a lot of great points made throughout the webinar. Mark Shinn discussed what RTI is, and how a district needs to build a common vision to have a successful RTI process. He discussed how RTI is supposed to help in providing services when students need them. You should not wait for a student to fail in Tier 2 before moving them into Tier 3. You should also use the most powerful interventions you can, and provided examples of websites that recommend research based intervention in both reading and behavior. He also discussed misunderstandings about RTI. These included:

• RTI is not doing your old way of business/referral and just calling it RTI


• It is not expecting general education teachers to modify their curriculum for each individual student (25 interventions for 25 students)


• It is not jumping through hoops to provide services to a student


• It is not a referral-driven system (paperwork and psychological testing)

Christy Chambers discussed resources to help in the implementation of RTI, such as our RTI survey and CASE/NASDSE’s blueprints. I unfortunately missed Alexa’s portion of the presentation, but the webinar is archived on District Administration’s website. At the end of the webinar they took questions from education staff that are actually going through implementing a RTI process.