Discussion 2: Strategies for Best Practice in Integrating Special Education Within an MTSS

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RTI Special Education

RTI Special Education Program Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR: The following presentation features educators from an elementary school who discuss best practices for integrating special education into general education to assess, intervene with, and improve the educational experiences of their students.

MERLE SCHWARTZ: So I feel inclined to say that, while we demonstrated an RTI meeting, at your school, you call it a problem solving team, which is terrific. And so my first question, really, is how did you get this model up and running? How did it start? How has it evolved? Ingrid, would you like to kick it off?

INGRID WIEMER: Yeah, in our district, we've been under the belief that its best practice is to have a problem solving team to help general education teachers when problems arise with students, whether that's academic or behavioral or social emotional. So we've been doing teams like this in our district for probably over a decade.

But where we slid into the response to intervention mode and formalized the process a little more was when special ed law was reauthorized in 2004. But a year or two before that, our district saw the trend that legislation was taking. And so we were proactive in getting together groups.

And in our state, we have special education coops. And so they had written a grant called Principal-Led Problem Solving Teams. So they helped us and trained administrators in neighboring districts and districts that were part of the coop in this model. So I would say that we've been pretty proactive and started the response to intervention and problem solving teams even before the authorization came down.

SUE BARKHAUSEN: And I would say here, at our school, we've been doing this problem solving team for about six years with a staff of over 50 people. Everyone has been trained in this problem solving process, particularly response to intervention. And what's wonderful about this is with everyone trained, we have volunteers who will volunteer to be on the committee. And so we were able to see that in our meeting earlier.

BRIDGET BOOKER: Another interesting component-- thinking back nine years, when we started with the principal-led problem solving teams, we did do it throughout all the schools in our district. And so it was not just our school here.

RTI Special Education

And I think, at our district in particular, because we are a high performing district, we had students that were struggling that wouldn't typically be considered special education students, but students that struggled academically among the peers in their school.

And we really looked at trying to find interventions that would be general education in order to help them to be successful in their classroom among their peers here. And they would oftentimes be average students in other schools that were just struggling here in our district.

MERLE SCHWARTZ: You mention that members are volunteers, so I find that pretty remarkable that people are that committed and interested to be able to volunteer to be on the team. I am curious that you said everyone got trained. And I'm kind of curious as to what that looked like. How do you train everybody?

SUE BARKHAUSEN: We did it in thirds. So I would say third went in the fall. A third went in the spring. A third went in the following fall. And we did a lot of role playing during that practice. It was several days. And hopefully, those people volunteered right away to be on the committee so they could use this new skills. And it's been very successful.

BRIDGET BOOKER: We really went into two tiers, originally-- training a group of special education teachers and general education teachers to develop a group. And then we problem solved a child throughout the process of a year. So we really took somebody that we can really take from the beginning to the end of a school year and use all the different elements of the model in order to get a better understanding of what we needed to learn.

And then in year two, that group went onto advanced training. And then a new group would become part of your one training. So we did it in stages, as well. And so throughout the district, we had many different teachers that were at different levels that could help support one another.

So not only was the support school-wide, but it was also among the district. And we would get together periodically. We also had members of that cooperative come and train us at the setting. So as we had some more intense needs, we learned some more specific interventions and really fine tuned our meetings to help look at data.

And that was probably the thing that was the most difficult to fine tune-- is that It wasn't just subjective and anecdotal. It was really data-based decision making.

INGRID WIEMER: And we feel strongly that it's still our professional responsibility to continue to train our members and hone what we do. And we ascribe to a continuous improvement model and make sure that new staff members are trained, too. So it is ongoing.

RTI Special Education

MERLE SCHWARTZ: So I notice that you have a number of people that were sitting around the table today for your RTI or problem solving meeting. And I'd love to know a little bit about the roles that different people play. And Debbie, you want to kick this one off?

DEBBIE CUSTER: Sure. The committee actually is a volunteer committee it changes every year. Teachers offer to sit on the committee, which is great because we meet after school twice a month, which is more often than a lot of the committees for the building meet.

And we try, though, to have a representation of general education teachers, speech pathologists, the reading specialist-- there is a reading specialist on continuously, but then we also might call in a different reading specialist working with a particular student. As a school psychologist, I am in charge of taking in the paperwork when the students are referred and getting the meetings set up.

In terms of other jobs on the committee, we have a time keeper. We have a note taker and then the facilitator and what other?

SUE BARKHAUSEN: An observer.

DEBBIE CUSTER: An observer. We try to have someone other than me go in and observe the student, or other than the classroom teacher-- who probably isn't as familiar with the student or maybe not familiar all-- go in and do some observations so that we have that information at our meetings, hopefully less biased than the classroom teacher might be, looking at on task behavior or other things environmentally that might be going in the classroom that might be contributing to the student's difficulties.

SUE BARKHAUSEN: We'd like to have a representative from kindergarten, first, second-- whatever grades we're dealing with so we can get their perspective, which is so helpful in the problem solving model.

DEBBIE CUSTER: And the team is smaller this year than last. Last year was a larger team. But we still do have, I think, pretty good representation.

MERLE SCHWARTZ: And it looked like you were working with some kind of a form. Can you tell me a little bit about what that was? We have a form that was originally designed probably through that cooperative, where the layout is what is the presenting problem, what's being done?

SUE BARKHAUSEN: What's the hypothesis?

DEBBIE CUSTER: What hypotheses are you working off of? What's the goal you're going to set for the student? And then following up on what the plan would

RTI Special Education

be and revisiting it in the future-- and that, I think, is, in general, a format that's used probably around the nation. But it might look a little different in the literature.

A lot of that is discussed as the areas that you should be looking at when you're problem solving. And then response to intervention has shifted that a little bit. We're still using the problem solving paperwork, because it seems to meet our needs. But when you look at response to intervention-- that new focus, I think, is off of that original problem solving process.

So different schools might have changed some of their paperwork. We're using the same paperwork. We've added in the graphs and that type of thing.

BRIDGET BOOKER: You've also added in some paperwork specific to RTI in terms of the resources used in the programs that are being used.

DEBBIE CUSTER: Instructional planning form that we have teachers complete that look at who's providing what, where, how often? And so that allows us, in our follow ups and even in our decision making at the original meeting, to decide how much is being done? Are we doing enough? And everybody contributes to that discussion.

SUE BARKHAUSEN: It's great for documentation. So if we hear about the same child from the year before, we can refer Debbie's file or all of our files to see what did we do last year? Which tier-- was it tier three or tier two, tier one? You don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's right there.

BRIDGET BOOKER: And it also provides data. So in case this child does end up going under special education consideration, we already have data that's already being brought forth and it shortens the timeline for support.

MERLE SCHWARTZ: So part of RTI is to have a model where you provide intervention for all students that have need before you start to categorize them and put labels on them. I am curious how you know when-- at what point a student who has been in regular education might, in fact, need to be identified for special services.

DEBBIE CUSTER: That's a really good question. It's a difficult question, but what we do, I think, in general, as an overview of everything, would be the different tiers of intervention. So you have a tier one, which occurs in the classroom. Tier two usually is a pull out with the reading specialist or somebody else. Tier three is the most intensive under RTI, which may be done with a reading specialist. But typically, in our building, it goes then to the special educator specialist.

And so we'll do the tier three with that person and look at how they're responding. And that's kind of a queue as to whether or not this student really is a candidate to be met on in discussing different domains of deficits and strengths and looking

RTI Special Education

at gathering further information and deciding whether or not special education is where they should be. Because they're not making the progress with all that intervention, and you can't do it forever.

SUE BARKHAUSEN: We have a period of time. We look at it for 6 to 12 weeks, a little bit longer. But we would ideally try and switch programs. It's an important time to really use an explicit, systematic, serious tier three program-- research- based, and hopefully the child will start seeing success.

INGRID WIEMER: Yeah, I think the team does a great job with looking at some important queries of did the child make sufficient gains in the intervention to either close the gap and then to be reinfused into the classroom? Or is the child not making sufficient gains and needs something much more intensive?

Or if we are doing an intensive intervention as part of RTI, looking at is the child making insufficient gains? And we need to continue that. But what we've set up, the structure is so time and labor intensive and needs long term care for that intervention to be sustained-- we need to look to the special services department, then, at that point.

So there's a lot of different tier decision making. And some problem solving teams operate a little bit differently in where they would make those decision points. But I think it works well here. It's shared decision making. And we have a large problem solving team, so that's helpful-- that we're all comfortable in what we're recommending for a student that works best for our environment educationally.