3
Academic and behavioral interventions are more individualized in Tier 3 for students with increased learning needs and challenging behaviors. These students often require prerequisite skills that allow them to achieve successful experiences with the core instruction. Increased monitoring and reinforcement offer students in Tier 3 alternate ways to achieve successful engagement with the academics as well as necessary self-reflection.
Skilled interventionists often provide instruction in Tier 3 within and outside the general education classroom to address students’ skill deficits. Students may tap out syllables, practice multidigit computations, read and listen to appropriately leveled text to understand what is implied in a nonfiction article, and receive more intensive strategies to successfully experience learning and behavioral strides. Progress monitoring is more frequent in Tier 3, with heightened teacher and student reflections and increased collaborative planning.
The Four Cs of RTI
Buffum and colleagues (2012) refer to the four Cs of RTI, or the four practices all educators must follow if students are to succeed. They consider these the essential guiding principles of RTI.
1. Collective responsibility: Embraces the idea that the primary responsibility of each educator is to ensure high levels of learning for every student
2. Concentrated instruction: Is a systematic process of identifying essential knowledge and skills that all students must learn at high levels. This includes determining the specific learning needs for each student
3. Convergent assessment: Is a continual process of analyzing evidence to identify the specific learning needs for each student and the effectiveness of instruction in meeting those needs
4. Certain access: Is a process that ensures that every student receives the time and support needed to learn at high levels
These principles support learning the core as well as meeting national and provincial learning standards. At the writing of this book, education focuses on using national and provincial standards and narrowing the global achievement gap (Achieve, 2015). Preparing students for successful adult lives and to be college and career ready involves planning, communication, and collaboration.
Preparing students for successful adult lives and to be college and career ready involves planning, communication, and collaboration.
Core Knowledge
Teachers must deliver the knowledge and skills students need to meet these expectations to ensure students own the core knowledge, which is the foundation for higher-level thinking skills. Core knowledge involves the basics. Teachers determine what students know and need to know, therefore developing, nurturing, and expanding student skills. Whether a student reads a fiction or nonfiction book or article, uses mathematical operations to compute, solves multistep word problems, listens to rap or country music, or views Renaissance or abstract art, there is a basic core knowledge he or she recognizes, acknowledges, explores, and embraces.
Heidi Hayes Jacobs (2012) speaks of the core as “what is at the heart of teaching and learning” (pp. vii–viii). Harvey Silver, Thomas Dewing, and Matthew Perini (2012) provide teachers with core, research-based strategies, referring to literacy and thinking skills. Core knowledge includes solid literacy and mathematics skills and the ability to think critically across the grades and disciplines—from science to music, history, art, world languages, and more.
This book offers interventions, instructional coaching strategies, and curriculum lessons and resources to help learners gain core knowledge and excellent life outcomes. Without meaning attached to classroom practice and life applications, knowledge exists in a vacuum. Curriculum standards achieve meaning in instructional moments that offer multiple strategies delivered in multiple locations (Bridges-Rhoads & Van Cleave, 2016).
Ultimately, students must be the ones who hold the core knowledge in their hands, hearts, and brains. However, sometimes the texts that we use are “imbued with power” (Compton-Lilly, 2011, p. 432). The knowledge in a textbook is important, but it cannot be an entity unto itself. Teacher wisdom that goes beyond the textbook pages includes the knowledge of how to instruct a diverse student population.
Structure of This Book
Navigating the Core Curriculum: RTI Strategies to Support Every Learner offers strategies for general and special educators, student support teams, curriculum supervisors, instructional coaches, related service providers, and administrators. These strategies are connected to individual learner characteristics, classroom instructional practice, and core knowledge. University professors for preservice teachers, new teachers, and veteran teachers will also benefit from this resource since it offers practical ways to build mastery of core knowledge. The takeaways (or main ideas) offer research-based teaching and learning practices that help engage all students—high achieving, at grade level, below proficient, and those with behavioral issues—in diverse classrooms.
The goal of this book is to replace anxieties and apprehensions with RTI despite “travel obstacles” educators may encounter on the journey.
Each chapter of this book includes the following elements.
➢ Evidence-based practice: Evidence-based practice includes, but is not limited to, instructional designs with differentiated instruction and multiple engagements (activities or other methods to teach a concept) through a universal design for learning (UDL) approach—taking into account the why, what, and how of learning. Multiple engagements promote more than knowing the facts but value how to increase interest, curiosity, and the overall motivation to learn. Teachers must offer instruction that is varied and responsive to learner diversity by mimicking the interactive and varied stimuli offered outside the classroom and allow students to “play” with core concepts rather than memorize facts.
➢ Multiple curriculum entry points: The sample lessons in this book show K–12 teachers how to teach concepts or learning goals in ways that engage students. Multiple curriculum entry points require viewing the curriculum through a lens that allows students of diverse levels entry to the core knowledge. This includes activities that invoke and value academic, behavioral, social, emotional, and cultural connections. The lessons cross all disciplines and grade levels.
Chapter 1 discusses how we can open the door for all learners by offering successful strategies and mindsets that bring together the RTI variables of classroom dynamics and teacher expertise into a cohesive framework with prescriptive, responsive, and contextually engaging tasks. This chapter provides tiered literacy and mathematics scenarios for RTI, along with successful strategies and mindsets. Implications for oral expression, listening comprehension, reading fluency and comprehension, vocabulary development, and mathematical computations and applications are offered.
Chapter 2 discusses how to approach the core vocabulary in reference to vocabulary development and early literacy skills. This chapter helps teachers determine student knowledge and select and implement the appropriate vocabulary interventions. This process starts with identification that leads to interventions and, in turn, internalization of core knowledge and skills. This chapter provides the strategies, tools, and resources to achieve success in vocabulary, whether students are at grade level, require enrichment, or are in need of intervention. It provides elementary, middle school, and high school lessons to fuel vocabulary knowledge at different learner levels.
