RtI Nugget: RtI School-Wide Team vs. Teacher Teams

At the start of our RtI journey, it was mentioned that RtI is not simply the meetings you attend with our psychologist when you want an individualized action plan or additional support for a student. That is a slice of RtI, but it is not all of RtI. Instead, there are essentially two sides that we have to make sure are rock solid if we are going to support all of our learners.

1) Teacher Teams: Teacher teams collaborate to determine essential standards/learning, look at evidence of student learning based on those standards, and then respond. In addition, they also make sure that tier 1 for all students is a home run. Together, they look at data, collaborate around interventions for all students (even high achievers can receive interventions), and work as a professional learning community. They put students into intervention groups and provide support, often times together (WIN times). This occurs in ongoing cycles.

These teams should consist of:

-level teachers
-specialists
-any SRP support that works with that level
-school leadership (when needed)

2)School-Wide Team: Despite intervention efforts at the tier 2 level from teacher teams, some students may still need more support with behavior, attendance, academics, or motivation. When a student is not making adequate growth with interventions, they would be brought to an RtI meeting with the school-wide team (IST). At these meetings, action plans are created and timelines are set. Although a student may be brought to this table and end up with more individualized support per the created action plan, they should still receive daily tier 1 instruction and be part of any intervention time that the teacher team has developed for their students. These interventions are to supplement all the great things already happening not supplant it.

These teams should consist of:

-mental health team
-specialists
-special education teacher
-gen ed. teacher
-school leadership

As you can see, we have elements of both that give us a strong readiness for RtI--in my eyes, we are going to completely thrive with this shift (when we get to that point...slow and steady:) ). With that, however, there will be some tweaks that we may have to consider related to how teacher teams collaborate and how the school-wide team operates. I've heard a lot of people mention that QUEST used to operate a bit more like this, so I am excited to see how we bring some of that back as we look to benefit our awesome kids.