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A Partnership Collection

Welcome to IDEA Partnership's Collaborative Work on Response to Intervention!


The IDEA Partnership is dedicated to improving outcomes for students and youth with disabilities by joining state agencies and stakeholders through shared work and learning. This dedication has been operationalized in the collaborative work on RTI of 65 partner organization representatives, five technical assistance providers, and a number of state and local organizations and agencies. Members of this Response to Intervention collaborative workgroup represent a range of roles at all levels of the education system as well as coming from geographic locations from across the United States. Together with the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), these partners form a community with the potential to transform the way we work.

  • Our Charge is to think about Response to Intervention from stakeholder perspectives at all knowledge levels, to look at things differently, and to speak to practical application by taking the ideas of researchers and making them tangible to those in the field.

     

  • Our Goal is to provide you with access to a comprehensive collection of materials and resources to assist you in furthering understanding of Response to Intervention (RTI) processes. We hope this collection complements your current work, and we encourage you to share it with your colleagues and peers.

     

  • Our Grounding Assumptions and Guiding Principles provides the unifying beliefs that are the foundation for our collaborative efforts on RTI. You might want to share these among the groups with whom you work to build a common sense of purpose.

     

  • Glossary provides key terms and acronyms associated with RTI.

 

Response to Intervention is the practice of providing high-quality instruction/intervention matched to student needs and using learning rate over time and level of performance to inform educational decision-making. RTI provides an improved process and structure for school teams to design, implement, and evaluate both daily instruction and specific interventions. Some elements of RTI have been used informally in practice for many years with varying degrees of success.

RTI is a process that focuses on every student achieving to high levels. RTI implementation reaches students of diverse backgrounds including English language learners, children of low socio-economic status, minority students, those struggling with social/emotional/behavioral issues, students with special needs, and gifted and talented students. Improving outcomes for all students has the potential to result in overall school improvement. Some of the same tools used within a Response to Intervention approach may be used to measure school improvement and accountability under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In addition to impacting educational outcomes for struggling students, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004 provides states and districts the opportunity to use a "process of responsiveness to intervention" as part of the specific learning disability evaluation process. The following are tools designed to guide both your tour through this site and ideas for application and resources:

 

The collection is designed to assist you in learning more about Response to Intervention and best

practices for its implementation on all levels-- federal, state, and local. The following links help

frame your work around RTI for your stakeholders:

* Families

* Teachers and Related Service Providers

* Local Administrators (Superintendents and Principals)

* Policymakers 

* Higher Education


Representatives of national organizations, who are engaged with their stakeholders on the issue of RTI, offer suggestions for sharing and dialogue based on the amount of time available to you.  Additionally, suggested activities, materials, and resources were identified as possible valuable tools for your use.

 

The Beginning Collection
This section is intended for those who are new to the term Response to Intervention. It gives a brief overview of the topic and how it is best utilized to help you meet your goals for student improvement (e.g. monitoring individual student learning, adequate yearly progress of subgroups).  In this section you will find:

  • Leaving No Child Behind: Response to Intervention Fundamentals for Educators and their Partners
    This is an Introductory PowerPoint presentation with a Presenter’s Guide designed to share with audiences possessing little knowledge of RTI. Please feel free to use them with your colleagues and peers.

  • Response to Intervention: Policy Considerations and Implementation--PowerPoint Presentation
    This is an Intermediate level PowerPoint presentation with a Presenter’s Guide has intermediate level content and is intended for audiences with “a working level” knowledge of RTI.

  • IRIS MODULE: Response to Intervention (Part 1): An Overview
    This was identified by our partners as an appropriate source to ground beginning discussion of RTI.

  • Dialogue Guides provide a brief overview of key ideas along with questions to stimulate deeper conversation.

These materials can also help you identify elements of your current process so you can build on what is already in place and create a comprehensive system for serving all students.


The Advanced Collection
This section is intended for those who have a more advanced awareness of RTI.  It includes some introductory information and provides detail on the identification process for students with learning disabilities and behavior disorders. You will find a PowerPoint presentation and Presenter’s Guide (under development) designed to share with audiences who have knowledge and/or some experience with RTI.  It addresses the questions of how to serve the entire student body for overall school improvement (policy and professional development issues), while individualizing the attention needed for identifying and attending to the needs of struggling students.


The Practice Collection
This section is designed to give access to resources for states, districts, and schools who want to learn more from colleagues about how they are implementing systematic approaches to RTI. This section includes website links to a variety of examples of the Response to Intervention throughout the country.

 

Dialogue Guides
Dialogue Guides are models for conducting interactive discussions across stakeholders.. Each Guide circulates a common set of source materials and suggested procedures for involving various audiences in States and districts. In this manner, stakeholders all over the country can begin interacting in new ways around implementation issues. Each dialogue guide title has questions written specifically for a target audience by representatives of that audience. Click on the link above to find dialogue guides on 6 RTI topics:

  • Struggling Readers

  • Classroom Assessment

  • IQ Achievement discrepancy Model

  • What is RTI?

  • Rationale for RTI

  • Two Approaches to RTI

 

Your Voice
Your experiences help the Partnership and our readers understand issues and perspectives.  Please take a minute to share:

  • Your RTI initiative and the strategies involved

  • What strategies are working and reasons for success

  • What problems (barriers) you have encountered and how they were solved

  • Innovative approaches to interventions in all 3 tiers

  • How you promote RTI across groups and organizations.

To help us understand how the Partnership collection is useful, please take a minute to share:

  • How you used the collection

  • Your reactions to the collection

  • Your ideas for improving the collection