October 2010 | Volume 68 | Number 2

Interventions That Work

Not Waiting for Superman

Marge Scherer

Table of Contents

Double Take

Table of Contents

The Why Behind RTI

Austin Buffum, Mike Mattos and Chris Weber

The underlying premise of Response to Intervention (RTI) is that schools should not wait until students fall far enough behind to qualify for special education to provide them with the help they need. Instead, schools should provide targeted and systematic interventions to all students as soon as students demonstrate the need. However, schools that focus primarily on raising test scores, implement RTI as a series of discrete actions rather than an on-going process, implement RTI mostly to comply with the law, or see student failure as a failure in learning will struggle to reap the benefits of RTI. When all students have guaranteed access to rigorous curriculum and effective initial teaching, targeted and timely supplemental support, and personalized intensive support provided by highly trained educators, few will experience failure.

This article addresses how to use differentiated instruction and assessment to close the achievement gap.

Table of Contents

Flagged for Success

Robyn R. Jackson

A teacher establishes red flags—clear and unambiguous warning signals—that enable her to intervene before students fail. Any student who has less than an 80 percent class average or who receives less than 80 percent on a quiz immediately moves into an intervention cycle in which the teacher regularly "checks in" with the student. Interventions include providing a review packet and various instructional supports, requiring student attendance at lunchtime acceleration and remediation sessions, and conferencing with parents.

This article addresses how to close the achievement gap for at-risk students through assessment and remedial instruction.

Table of Contents

The Words Students Need

Joshua F. Lawrence, Claire White and Catherine E. Snow

Students who struggle with reading comprehension in middle school often lack the academic vocabulary the need to understand grade-level textbooks and other instructional materials. Research shows that to learn a new word well, students need to encounter and use it multiple times in different contexts. The authors describe Word Generation, a whole-school vocabulary program that introduces students to academic words that commonly occur across content areas. Students are introduced to 5-7 words each week in the context of a high-interest reading passage about a controversial topic. They encounter these words and use them in topic-related learning activities in various academic classes throughout the week. Preliminary research in Boston Public Schools shows that Word Generation builds academic vocabulary, which translates into improved literacy.

Table of Contents Buy the Article

Calling All Frequent Flyers

Ross W. Greene

School discipline hasn't kept pace with what we now know about why some students have behavioral challenges and why traditional approaches to school discipline are often counterproductive. Challenging students are challenging—not because they lack motivation—but because they lack crucial cognitive skills, especially in the domains of flexibility/adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving. Plan B is a collaborative problem solving approach to classroom management that involves three steps: the empathy step, which involves gathering information from a student to achieve the clearest possible understanding of his or her perspective on a given unsolved problem; the defining the problem step, which involves entering the adult's concern into consideration as well; and the invitation step, which involves brainstorming solutions to achieve a solution that is realistic and mutually satisfactory.

Table of Contents Buy the Article

Lazy—Or Not?

Peg Dawson

Child psychologist Peg Dawson explains that some students who appear to be lazy simply lack the executive skills they need to stay organized and get their work done. She tells the story of Josh, a student with attention problems whose academic performance started plummeting in middle school. With the help of a coach, Josh learned to manage his time better and complete his assignments. Dawson shares several time management and child psychology strategies schools can use to help students like Josh with study skills. She suggests implementing an RTI framework in which all students receive some support for developing study skills, and other get additional help in small groups or individually if they need it.

Table of Contents

Faces of Autism

Pamela Hudson Baker, Mary Murray, Carolyn Murray-Slutsky and Betty Paris

Autism spectrum disorder is a complex phenomenon, affecting students in many different ways. Therefore, effective interventions for students with this condition need to be flexible and individualized. This article looks at two very different students with autism spectrum disorder describing the behaviors that cause school problems for these students and the approaches their schools use to support their learning. The article asserts that efforts to support these students must be comprehensive and collaborative, involving a team of educators.

Table of Contents Buy the Article

Responding to a Student's Depression

R. Marc A. Crundwell and Kim Killu

Although depression is classified as an adult mental health disorder, middle to late adolescence is the age when symptoms most commonly surface. If teachers can recognize the signs of depression in students, Crundwell and Killu assert, they can provide a supportive, flexible school environment that enables depressed students to learn and thrive. The authors delineate the most noticeable characteristics of depression in children and adolescents, and what these symptoms tend to look like in school. They present a case history of a coordinated approach to helping Rita, a depressed high school student. With her cooperation, a team at Rita's school created a plan for helping her cope academically and socially, relying on strategies like designating a "touchstone" teacher she checked in with daily, setting weekly individualized goals, and providing in-class supports from task-by-task time lines to frequent physical exercise.

Table of Contents

Lessons of Mastery Learning

Thomas R. Guskey

Schools are frequently inundated with demands to implement new instructional interventions and teaching methods that are not yet backed up by a solid body of research. Fortunately, many of these innovations include elements of more established strategies for which evidence of positive effects does exist. Guskey describes the core elements of one such well-established teaching method, mastery learning. He explains a number of its essential features—including diagnostic pre-assessment with pre-teaching, progress monitoring through regular formative assessments, and enrichment or extension activities—which are also incorporated into the Response to Intervention model.

Table of Contents Buy the Article

Baiting the Reading Hook

Jennifer McCarty Plucker

A 9th grade language arts teacher explains how her school helped struggling readers by placing them in an Academic Literacy class that gave them time to read books for pleasure and helped them develop strategies for choosing books, eliminating distractions, and monitoring their thinking as they read. Ninth grade students took this reading class in addition to their regular 9th grade English class, which helped close the gap between the amount of reading struggling readers do in school and the amount of reading high achievers do. The small class size and individualized instruction, along with activities meant to create enthusiasm for reading, helped adolescents make literacy progress at a faster rate than similar peers who were not assigned to the class.

Table of Contents Buy the Article

Interventions You Can Use

Elaine Miskinis, Cynthia Freyberger, Kathleen Vetter, Sylvia Turner, Veronica Tigert, David Nagel and John T. Roskosky

There's no "one-size-fits-all" intervention; teachers need many tricks up their sleeves if they hope to help struggling students. This article highlights four different approaches that schools around the country use to reach hard-to-reach kids.

Three high school educators in New Hampshire tell how they turned chronic "book haters" on to reading by creating in-school book clubs and giving club members free choice of what to read (but not of whether to participate).

Sylvia Turner and Veronica Tigert showcase "math camp"—a five-day immersion in math learning in a fun setting that rescues 4th-6th grade students falling behind in math.

David Nagel describes how teacher teams at a New York charter school target precisely what skills students need to improve and require all students to stay an hour after school for help geared to their particular lacks.

And retired principal John Roskosky relates how he worked individualized tutoring into the school day in an El Paso high school, including hiring local university students as tutors.

Topics of this article include after-school programs, tutoring, and remedial instruction.

Table of Contents Buy the Article

A ROARing Success

Iona Whishaw

A Vancouver high school that struggled with poverty, low scores, and student misbehavior decided to turn things around by implementing a detailed code of conduct that they called ROARS for Respect, Ownership, Attitude, Responsibility, and Safety. Teachers and students were extensively trained in the new code, and teachers started using ROARS language when they saw students violating the code. When teachers and students started to show signs of discouragement with the code, new principal Iona Whishaw took steps to make ROARS an integral part of the school culture. Eventually, students started taking responsibility for their own actions and encouraged their classmates to do the same, and the school climate has been transformed. Failure rates have plummeted, and the school now has a waiting list for enrollments.

Table of Contents Buy the Article

Start with the Adults

Angel L. Rodriguez

A new principal in a school for students diagnosed with emotional and behavioral disabilities tries to improve the dismal record of student achievement, but without much success. When he and his staff look at student suspension rates, they discover that many of the school's policies are excessively exclusionary and that teachers are inconsistent in their application of classroom management procedures. Teachers and administrators come together to question and revise school policies and procedures and decide to implement positive behavior support strategies schoolwide.

Table of Contents Buy the Article

Drastic School Turnaround Strategies Are Risky

Jane L. David

Table of Contents

Reviving Reteaching

Robert J. Marzano

Table of Contents

Cell Phones as Teaching Tools

William M. Ferriter

Table of Contents

The Lure of Consensus

Thomas R. Hoerr

Table of Contents

ASCD Community in Action

Table of Contents

How Can We Boost Staff Morale?

Tom Hoerr and Jen Morrison

Table of Contents

Doing RTI Right

Mechelle Bryson, Angela Maden, Laurin Mosty and Susan Schultz

During the first four years that Coppell Independent School District in Texas implemented RTI, educators identified struggling students, developed intervention plans designed to close achievement gaps, and created staff development that touted the benefits of the pyramid of tiered instruction—but all without the expected results. The district found that it needed to start by addressing four roadblocks: the student deficit model, the tradition of handing off students to special education, teachers' overreliance on intuition instead of assessment data, and the erroneous idea that RTI is just a new pathway to special education. The district's plan involved realigning the initiative to the National Blueprint, designing a supportive infrastructure, and changing the prevailing mind-set about RTI.

Table of Contents

Intervention as an Inside Job

Rebecca Ballantine and Allison Gaines Pell

It was a wakeup call when teachers at Urban Assembly Academy of Arts & Letters middle school in Brooklyn jointly realized that their most struggling readers were the least engaged learners in all classrooms, not just language arts. So the staff designed an in-school reading lab that serves the school's kids with low reading scores for an intensive five-week period each summer and with daily blocks of extra reading support throughout the school year. Ballantine and Gaines Pell detail the instructional support the lab provides, through vocabulary study and guided reading in small groups; free reading time with books at each student's level; read-alouds of historical novels connected to content in students' humanities classes; and vocabulary instruction.

Table of Contents

Differentiated Instruction and RTI: A Natural Fit

Susan Demirsky Allan and Yvonne L. Goddard

Teachers often feel frustrated when their schools ask them to implement one initiative after another with little guidance as to how these programs work together. The authors of this article explain how two popular programs—differentiated instruction and response to intervention—complement each other. They give examples of how each tier of response to intervention should incorporate differentiation, and assert that "the central goal of both models is to modify instruction so that it meets students' individual needs and thus nurtures their success." They call for improved professional development that supports regular and special education teachers in implementing DI and RTI simultaneously.

Table of Contents

Include, Belong, Learn

George Theoharis and Julie Causton-Theoharis

With true inclusive school reform, schools provide all students—including those with identified disabilities—access to as much of the full curriculum as possible. Theoharis and Theoharis describe how two elementary schools in New York—each with a significant population of students with disabilities—restructured their classes and teaching assignments to provide all students access to the general education curriculum and full membership in mainstream classes. The authors spent a year consulting with both schools as they restructured to eliminate self-contained special education spaces. All learners at both schools now learn full-time in general education classrooms. Special education teachers work with two general education classrooms and a teaching assistant to coplan and coteach a diverse group, and teachers receive relevant professional development in differentiated instruction, inclusion, and team teaching. Both schools have seen achievement gains for all students, especially those with disabilities.

Table of Contents

EL Study Guide

Teresa Preston

Table of Contents

Inservice Guest Bloggers http://ascd.typepad.com/blog/educational_leadership/

Table of Contents

Copyright © 2012 by ASCD