Abridged Statement

When teachers speculate, reason, and contemplate using open-mindedness, whole-heartedness, and responsibility, they will act with foresight and planning rather than base their actions on tradition, authority, or impulse. Planning your daily drills, minilessons, centers, and reflections are key to making them work for you and the students. The teacher is the most important component of the Response to Intervention and Instruction program. Teachers make the final decisions about how to organize and create the learning environment for the students. Teachers must gather an arsenal of tools that will empower them to better plan lessons and empower the students to learn.

In order to integrate research-based strategies into your classroom, you must be sure to follow the classroom-tested procedures precisely as researchers lay them out. This is called teaching with fidelity, it is a key factor of highly qualified teaching. Within the classroom environment of RTI instruction, fidelity is a natural process that occurs when you do the following:

Adhere to the curriculum and assessment procedures as outlined by your chosen strategy.

Implement instruction systematically and explicitly to support students as needed.

Use specified instructional materials.

Link intervention strategies with targeted skills and intended outcomes.

Define responsibilities of students, teachers, and other instructional personnel.

Monitor students' progress through a systematic plan.

Inform all teachers working with a given student, and his or her parents, about the student's progress.

Collect data based on a student's performance.

Make decisions based on a student's performance data.

Participate in ongoing professional development.

There are five important components of a Core Reading Program:

Phonemic Awareness

Phonics

Comprehension

Vocabulary

Fluency

A comprehensive core literacy model includes opportunities for sustained engagement in personal reading and writing. Students need daily opportunities to read, write, listen, and speak. They also need daily instruction on decoding, comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, reading, and writing. Students need instruction and support including modeling, guided practice, and independent practice along with additional intervention when necessary. Students need to be grouped in a variety of groupings. The resources should be varied in genres, levels of difficulty, length of text, themes, topics, and types of media.

Effective teachers allow students to spend more time on task, engaged in real reading and writing, and allow students self-regulation.

Students need books that are just right for them with high interest, multi-level texts, multi-source texts, and multi-text lessons.

Classroom dialogue is more like conversation than interrogation.

Teachers are more coach than telling. Instruction needs to be side-by-side and small groups are balanced with large groups.

Assessments should assess student efforts and improvements, not just achievement.

These effective instructional strategies affect the learning of all students in the classroom. With high quality instruction, more students learn. Some students do need addition support. RTI will identify and support struggling readers. RTI is a 3-tier program for identifying and supporting struggling learners. Tier 1 is the high-quality daily instruction and assessments. Tier 2 is specific intervention for students who are struggling in reading. Tier 3 is more intense intervention or special education. 

Struggling students must have lessons in the comprehensive core literacy model that address their learning needs. Struggling readers need support as they transfer their learning from classroom and intervention lessons to their personal reading and writing. They must have books they can read during literacy instruction as well as content instruction. Struggling readers need more time to read and write at school. This may seem like less time focused on lower level skill instruction and more time focused on real reading, comprehension, higher level thinking, and writing throughout the day.