RTI for Adolescents- Part 1

Today, I attended the "High Impact Reading Interventions for Secondary Students" workshop at the ESC XI center which was led by Dr. Deborah K. Reed.  Reed is a former Texan, who has been transplanted to Florida, returning here to share RTI strategies with secondary teachers.  RTI is an acronym for Response to Intervention, a term usually used to indicate what strategies the teacher takes to help students that need extra support.  RTI is the actions we take to support struggling readers.

Students who struggle with reading can't be fixed in a single day.  Indeed, even an entire year is really not enough to completely transform adolescents that have been accustomed to not getting it.  But, we can aim to have the reasonable goal of helping them to a) first stabilize their performance relative to peers, and b) then move on to improving relative to peers.  Reed suggests that this is usually best done over two years minimum.

Beginning our session, Reed explained that it is a good idea to "know your enemy".  What this means is the teacher should know how test-makers construct the tests.  First, she discussed the concept of passage dependency.  Passage dependency is the desired effect where students must read the passage in order to answer the questions.  The student should not be able to answer the questions without reading, if they could, then the question would be considered passage independent.  Reading comprehension tests are not memory tests like most high school content areas use for assessment.  This is a skill-based test, where background knowledge is not necessary to succeed.  Instead, reading comprehension tests are looking to see if students understand the process of reading.  These exams require multiple readings, using strategies, and actively trying to be "close readers".

Another thing that is different about Texas reading tests, is that the newest assessment, the EOC, is a timed test.  In some ways, this goes against the idea of how to be an effective reader because strategies slow the students down so they are more closely reading the text.  We don't want students to just go through the motions of reading, where they do little more than word call.  Students need to get better about using their time wisely, to slowly attend to the text but to be able to do it in a way that doesn't waste time either.  It is a balance situation.  The ideal would be that the reader, text, and environment should be working together to get to a close reading.

We talked about four different types of questions, taken from Raphael & Au:

• Right there- in the text

• Think and Search- putting different parts of the passage together

• Author and Me- using text evidence to support a conclusion

• On My Own- using own background knowledge

There will be mostly Think and Search and Author and Me questions at a high school level, with very few Right There questions and On My Own being almost non-existent.  Therefore, students need to understand strategies for Think and Search and Author and Me questions.  She does not suggest that students should be required to identify the different types of questions, but she does say that teachers should be aware of what the test is comprised of.  However, some of the teachers that were in the room and discussing the strategy of identifying question types thought that it might be a good activity.  Personally, I would not suggest asking students to identify the question types.  I would provide them the questions and then I would discuss the questions and types with them as a part of a lesson on how to identify which strategies to use.

I will continue this discussion in the next post, RTI for Adolescents- Part Two.