Our role as Educators is to ensure all students learn and are successful. In a perfect world, this would be easy. We teach our class a skill or topic and all of those smiling faces are able to comprehend and apply it to their daily lives. However, we don’t live in a perfect world, and unfortunately all of our students don’t learn at the same rate and level.
Students struggle for various reasons. There could be a language barrier, a learning disability, or poor attendance. Regardless of the reason, we need to find solutions to help them succeed. That solution is called RTI, or Response To Intervention.
The goal of RTI is for the school to step in, or intervene, and help students before they fall too far behind. It is a proactive approach to measuring students’ skills and using this data to decide which types of targeted teaching to use. (Source)
The RTI process begins with screening the general education population. Struggling learners are provided with interventions at increasing levels of intensity to accelerate their rate of learning. The interventions could be given by the general education teacher, the special education teacher, and/or specialists. Progress is closely monitored for the learning rate and level of performance of the individual student. For the RTI process to work effectively, the following RTI components must be implemented: high-quality classroom instruction, ongoing student assessment, tiered instruction, and parental instruction.
RTI is broken up into different tiers, or levels of intervention that a school can implement. Tier 1 includes the general education population. All students in the general education population are tested at this tier. They are tested to ensure they are responding to the instruction they are receiving before they start to fall behind and struggle. Tier 1 includes positive behavior interventions such as rules, routines and physical arrangements that are developed and taught by school staff to prevent initial occurrences of bad behavior.
Tier 2 of RTI focuses 
on the students who are not responding well to the Tier 1 interventions. Tier 2 is for a targeted group of students. These students may receive an increase in the time and intensity that they are exposed to the core curriculum. Students may be placed in small groups to work on the specific skills that they are having trouble with.
Tier 3 of RTI is the intensive intervention stage. Students who have been found to be eligible for special education and related services will be placed in a more inclusive setting for more specialized support. Progress monitoring is essential at this stage. More time on a skill and small group instruction are to be expected at this level.
Do you feel some of your students may be at the beginning stages of struggling? Want to catch them before they really fall behind? Check out my RTI Road Block document available in my FREEBIE Resource Library. It’s an easy tool teachers and older students can both use to assess which skills need to be worked on, a plan of how they will work on them, and an evaluation of the process.
And if you are looking for resources 
for Intervention, I have begun to create a series of creations called Stop, Intervene and Learn. Each of these resources are meant to be done in small groups, are completely interactive and engaging for your students, include practice/assessment for each component, full color photos and more!
