to represent the basic instruction that all students receive. As students demonstrate the need for additional support, they move up the pyramid, receiving increasingly more targeted and intensive help. Fewer students should need the services offered at the upper levels, thus creating the tapered shape of a pyramid. The pyramid is also traditionally separated into tiers, with Tier 1 representing grade-level core instruction, Tier 2 supplemental interventions, and Tier 3 intensive student support.
… RTI does not endorse or dictate a specific curriculum, assessment product, or intervention program, but instead creates processes that empower educators to make these critical decisions based on the specific learning needs of their students. While RTI processes are applicable to behavior interventions, RTI implementation efforts have traditionally focused on academic curriculum and instructional practices (Sugai, 2001). (p. 9)
Its process is applicable to behavior interventions. Response to intervention is a research-based set of practices. RTI plans are required within school districts in the United States, and most districts, schools, and educators are familiar with the principles and practices of RTI. Let’s apply the familiar processes that we have applied to academics to the critically important area of behavioral skills.
The Six Steps of Behavioral RTI
Based on extensive research and empirical evidence, RTI is one of the most impactful sets of principles and practices in which schools can engage (Allington, 2011; Bloom, 1968, 1974, 1984; Burns, Appleton, & Stehouwer, 2005; Burns & Symington, 2002; Elbaum, Vaughn, Hughes, & Moody, 2000; Gersten, Beckmann, et al., 2009; Gersten, Compton, et al., 2009; Hattie, 2012; Swanson & Sachse-Lee, 2000; VanDerHeyden, Witt, & Gilbertson, 2007). However, in many schools, educators are applying RTI incorrectly, complicating the process, or misunderstanding the point entirely by focusing only on Tiers 2 and 3. Educators can follow certain steps, or elements, when applying the RTI model to alleviate these complications.
In behavioral RTI, district and school teachers and staff complete the following six core steps.
1. Identify the most critical behavioral skills.
2. Define and make sense of these skills.
3. Model, teach, and nurture these skills.
4. Measure student success in displaying these skills.
5. Provide differentiated supports that respect students’ current levels of readiness.
6. Intervene appropriately and as necessary when evidence reveals the need.
These six essential steps to developing students’ behavioral skills are the very same things that we do (or should do) as we strive to help students develop academic skills. Aligning our efforts and initiatives related to academics and behaviors is likely to decrease anxieties and increase efficacies.
This six-step behavioral RTI process ensures that a system exists for predicting and preventing frustration instead of reacting to students’ behavioral deficits. For example, we can predict students will bring very different, identifiable behavioral needs to our classrooms. We can prevent frustration and delay by being ready to model, teach, and measure these behaviors. We can predict that students will need differentiated supports to successfully access and demonstrate mastery of essential behavioral concepts and skills; we can proactively and positively prepare with varied teaching and learning options for Tier 1. We can predict that some students will learn at different rates and will need more than our first, best instruction; we can then prepare with more time and alternative differentiated supports at regular, planned intervals for students in Tier 2. We can predict that some students will have significant deficits in foundational skills; we can then prepare immediate, intensive, and targeted supports for those in Tier 3. In essence, RTI is actively and systematically anticipating students’ behavioral needs and proactively preparing supports. When we implement the six steps of behavioral RTI correctly, we serve students in a more timely, targeted, and organized manner.
RTI is a self-correcting system. When students are not responding to instruction and intervention, educators following RTI are ready with processes that ensure adjustments to their practices will be made until all students are responding and performing at or above grade level. Timely adjustments to supports are possible when applying the preceding six steps to the teaching and learning of behavioral skills.
For this six-step process to be impactful, RTI must be understood as applying to all students and embraced as the responsibility of all staff. Collective responsibility is a must. When all teachers and teacher teams are working together to apply the steps of behavioral RTI, it can become an effective system of teaching positive and necessary behavioral skills to all students in our classrooms.
Teacher Teams in Behavioral RTI
There is no RTI—whether in support or academic or behavioral skills—without Professional Learning Communities at Work™. RTI can be accurately described as “PLC+.” In a PLC at Work, educators believe that a learning (not teaching) is the point of our supports for students; they believe that evidence-informed results, not opinions, must define the efficacy of our efforts; and they believe that the only way to meet our lofty and important goal of high levels of learning for all students is to work and serve students in collaborative teams (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, & Mattos, 2016).
The four critical questions of PLCs, which are embedded within the preceding six-step process, are well known to most educators (DuFour et al., 2016):
1. What do we want students to learn?
2. How will we know if they have learned it?
3. What will we do if they don’t learn it?
4. How will we extend the learning for students who are already proficient?
Throughout Behavior: The Forgotten Curriculum; An RTI Approach for Nurturing Essential Life Skills, the tools, resources, and guidance provided are aimed at teacher teams working to provide behavioral RTI supports to students within the context of a PLC at Work.
Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports
Many educators interested in teaching behaviors may already be familiar with positive behavior interventions and supports (PBIS) and wonder why this book is focusing on RTI. In truth, a key goal of this book is to combine the elements of both RTI and PBIS. RTI has traditionally focused on proactively preparing and providing targeted supports in a collaborative, organized manner to meet the needs of different students, while PBIS has traditionally focused on the proactive and consistent modeling, reinforcing, and teaching of the behavioral skills that result in productive and positive environments. Both RTI and PBIS necessitate a schoolwide approach, and both provide different levels (tiers) of support to match the types and intensity of student needs.
Throughout this book, we work to incorporate up-to-date research on mindsets, social-emotional learning, and academic behaviors into RTI and PBIS to make them better integrated and more responsive to student needs, because, of course, different students have different behavioral needs. Students’ beliefs about their ability to learn, and their levels of engagement and feelings of belonging, all influence how they act. One of this book’s primary goals is to guide students’ development of more productive behaviors. But which behaviors, both social and academic, are most critical to success? How do we determine which students need which kind of emotional and behavioral supports, and then how do we nurture those behaviors for all students? This book steps you through a process of definition, diagnosis, differentiated implementation, assessment, and culture building to move beyond simple behavior change to building learning dispositions to last students a lifetime.
