Sorry about all the edu-speak

Today I had a full day of RTI training, which meant I had to spend yesterday afternoon creating a sub plan. For the first week of school. I think that's just wrong.

But the truth is, I needed the training. It's been brought to my attention that I never explained what RTI is, so here goes: RTI stands for Response to Intervention, and it refers to a process you would hope most schools would have in place for your kids already (but the truth is, not all schools do). It's actually a program that's much more common in elementary schools, because it's meant to use test data to catch students who are missing key concepts in reading or math and give them one-on-one or small group interventions to try and get the students up to grade level. So, if a student is tested in the fall and found to be below the 50th percentile for his or her grade level, that student might be pulled out of class for extra help and get tested more regularly to check if progress is being made. If they're below the 10th percentile they get even more additional help, and are checked more often. If, after a certain amount of different interventions have been attempted, the student is still way below grade level that student might be referred for special education testing. The idea is to use data more thoughtfully, to provide interventions systematically and to prevent students from ending up in special ed unnecessarily.

So, the paraprofessional at the ALC has been giving oral reading fluency tests to every student in the school this week. The goal is to get all students to read 150 words per minute with zero errors, which is the 50th percentile for 8th grade students. The fifteen students with the lowest fluency scores will be enrolled in my Soar to Success class because that class will be considered an intervention. Those students and a couple of others with low scores will be pulled out of class by me for a few minutes every day to work on other interventions to improve their reading. I will also test them about every 3 weeks (the very lowest couple students will be tested every week). The idea is to keep trying stuff to help until the data says they reach their goal of 150.

So the training today involved me finding out all this information, how to use the spreadsheets, how to administer the oral fluency probes, etc. It also involved lunch at Applebee's. I did not receive any training in the actual interventions I'm supposed to be administering, but I think we'll find that out at our next training day in October. For now I think I'm just supposed to get my Soar to Success class started and get the initial data, as well as their standardized test scores, set up in the district spreadsheets.

Anyway, I'm exhausted, and when I stopped by the school to see how the kids had done with the sub, I found out there are a couple of students I'm going to need to check in with (meaning give detention). Awesome. Now to try and have a weekend.