RTI Reading Series

RTI Reading Series

Overview

It is difficult to think of a field in which more calls for change have been made over the past 50 years than school psychology, yet the practice remains mostly stable (Bradley-Johnson & Dean, 2000). The most recent suggestions for research and practice describe school psychologists as instructional and mental health specialists in schools (Ysseldyke et al., 2006), which seems consistent with practitioner interests because the ability to engage in activities beyond traditional assessments is highly related to increased job satisfaction (VanVoorhis & Levinson, 2006). This disconnect between a desired, advocated, and actual role could be due to many factors including those attributable to the systems in which we work. First, education is generally resistant to change (Ysseldyke, 2001), but, perhaps more importantly, special education's reliance on and reinforcement of the search for pathology that is associated with disability categories is inconsistent with the desired role of school psychologists as scientist-practitioners and problem solvers (Bradley-Johnson & Dean, 2000; Deno, 2002; Reschly & Ysseldyke, 2002; Ysseldyke et al., 2006).

Discussion Analysis

Therefore, the purpose of this article is to discuss the three-tiered RTI approach and to recommend specific activities for school psychologists within and across the tiers. The effect on school psychologists' daily activities will also be discussed. Although the principles of RTI could be applied to any content area, we will focus on reading for this paper because that is the area in which the most research exists and in which most K-12 RTI initiatives occur.

Tier 1

The first tier of an RTI model addresses quality instruction in general education. In order for a student to access additional intervention services, we must first determine that the student is receiving quality instruction in the classroom. The National Research Council outlined key reading skills and instructional strategies for each grade. These included phonemic awareness and explicit phonics instruction in kindergarten and first grade; explicit phonics instruction, writing, and reading fluency in second grade; and fluency and comprehension instruction in third grade (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). At fourth grade, the emphasis changes from learning to read to reading to learn and is accompanied by vocabulary and comprehension instruction through middle school. In high school, it is comprehension and applications of reading (Snow et al., 1998). Thus, elementary reading instruction should involve at least 2 hours each day of a combination of explicit instruction, free-choice reading, word study, and writing (Snow et al., 1998).

Tier 2

Students who do not make adequate progress in general education despite a sound core reading curriculum receive additional support in Tier 2. Fuchs, Mock, Morgan, and Young (2003) characterized existing RTI models as either standard protocol or problem solving based. In other words, most RTI models involved either a common intervention among all children who were not reading proficiently or interventions developed for individual students by problem-solving teams. However, Reschly (2003) presented both of these approaches within one model, which seemed to make conceptual sense in that both sought to improve student learning and could probably work best within ...