Rti in Middle and High Schools

Response to intervention (RTI) is as a set of systematic, increasingly intensive educational interventions designed to target an individual student's specific learning challenges, and to provide a supplementary intervention that is aimed directly at those learning challenges in order to assist the student in progressing through school. Perhaps more than any other single initiative, RTI is likely to restructure how high school and middle school teachers teach in a very profound and fundamental way. Virtually every state is currently implementing some form of RTI, and all high school and middle school teachers will be participating in this initiative within five years, although in a 2008 survey of administrators of special education, only 27 percent indicated such implementation had begun for middle school, and 16 percent indicated it had begun for high school. While the impact of RTI alone will be significant, when coupled with differentiated lesson activities for all Tier 1 instruction and supported by up-to-date instructional technologies, that impact is likely to refocus instruction in middle and high school classes rather drastically. For that reason, RTI in Middle and High Schools discusses the innovations of RTI, differentiated instruction, and instructional technologies together. This book explores numerous case studies from actual implementation experiences for readers to identify issues of concerns, and it suggests solutions for the complex challenges that will need to be addressed during the RTI implementation process.