Making RTI Work at the Secondary Level

Sep 28, 2010 by Susan Fitzell

Although Response to Intervention (RTI) was originally implemented as an early intervention program with a focus on literacy at the lower elementary level, it is becoming increasingly apparent that schools need to address students who are not successful in grades six through 12 with something other than the traditional pattern of referring the students to special education.

Response to Intervention at tier three is sometimes considered primarily a pullout or after-school initiative and this pullout approach encounters various challenges at the secondary level:

1. Schools are short staffed and lack after-school resources and time.
2. It is difficult to find a class from which students can be pulled in order to implement an intervention plan.

There are, however, some more effective options for utilizing RTI at the secondary level:

1. Implement RTI in the general classroom by the general education teacher or a co-teaching team.
2. A push-in model that takes advantage of the skill sets of specialists, such as speech pathologists, occupational therapists, and intervention specialists, can also be effective.

In these options, interventions become, primarily, the responsibility of the general education teacher.  The advantage to this approach is that all students benefit from best practices being used, thereby making classroom teaching that much more effective on the whole.