Some assessment tools offer very good support for helping individual learners remedy misconceptions and strengthen mathematical knowledge.
For example, the students took a systemwide online assessment recently. When I looked at the results I noticed that one area I taught showed wonderful overall growth and the other area showed less overall growth. I wondered why the second area didn't show as much growth, so I started to look deeper. As I looked deeper, I noticed some really good evidence with regard to what I should add to that unit which included more work with math language related to operations and more work with order of operations. While I already taught those areas, clearly some students need a more tailored and specific approach.
We have RTI which can provide that, but the way our RTI is structured doesn't lend itself to this deeper approach. I think what might be a better RTI approach is to group students who have met most standards together for enrichment and then pull specific students out who demonstrate specific misunderstandings or need for greater practice, and give those students that support until they reach mastery. Note that our RTI program is an addition to our core program which consists of heterogeneous groups with a scaffolded approach to the standards-based program we teach.
If we restructured RTI in the way I suggest we could add consistency, depth, and greater analysis to our approach for students who need more or different. For example when I took a deeper look at the data, I noticed that one student clearly could not understand the volume model questions. We have studied that, but she clearly didn't know how to interpret the pictures. I know that this child will learn this quickly and I have the hands-on materials and model pictures that will make sense to her. It's just a matter of finding the time to work with this child one-to-one to remedy the situation.
I think this might be a good next step for RTI.
The core/enrichment groups housed in each classroom would work with an engaging, well-designed learning menu of enrichment and practice opportunities while the children who need more or different instruction in specific areas would work with a diagnostician team--a team of teachers willing to look deeper at the data and work with those students in more tailored, consistent, logical, and scaffolded ways to truly build their skills and knowledge.
I'm going to explore this more in the days to come.
