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Teachers Become Students on Staff Development Days
Early release days for students often means that teachers become the students as they participate in staff development.
This was the case on Oct. 31, when kindergarten to sixth-graders were released early. Two experts on the topic of Response to Intervention, Anna Rynski and Dr. Carmen Brown, both training specialists for the NYS Response to Intervention Personnel Development Project, trained teachers on several topics throughout the day.
Response to Intervention (RtI) is a multi-tier approach to the early identification and support of students with learning and behavior needs. The RtI process begins with high-quality instruction and universal screening of all children in the general education classroom. Struggling learners are provided with interventions at increasing levels of intensity to accelerate their rate of learning.
Ms. Rynski and Dr. Brown presented on "Bridging the RtI Divide". In other words, how to take the data that the speech teacher, social worker, psychologist, and remedial reading/math teachers garner through screenings, evaluations and monitoring and translate that data into practical, classroom applications that a classroom teacher can use in a meaningful way. They also worked on how to make connections from the "therapy room" to the classroom, i.e. this is what I found to work during my remedial reading session with Johnny... here's what it looks like in your classroom.
In the afternoon, Dr. Brown and Ms. Rynski presented more information on Response to Intervention and provided RtI online resources teachers can go to and find interventions for any particular need. They discussed case studies they have gathered through their statewide work with children who have skill deficits. They demonstrated interventions a teacher could use to address skill deficits. The teachers broke out to a computer lab to find specific interventions for students in their class.
This practical and meaningful work will then be revisited at a future faculty meeting with their principal.
This was the case on Oct. 31, when kindergarten to sixth-graders were released early. Two experts on the topic of Response to Intervention, Anna Rynski and Dr. Carmen Brown, both training specialists for the NYS Response to Intervention Personnel Development Project, trained teachers on several topics throughout the day.
Response to Intervention (RtI) is a multi-tier approach to the early identification and support of students with learning and behavior needs. The RtI process begins with high-quality instruction and universal screening of all children in the general education classroom. Struggling learners are provided with interventions at increasing levels of intensity to accelerate their rate of learning.
Ms. Rynski and Dr. Brown presented on "Bridging the RtI Divide". In other words, how to take the data that the speech teacher, social worker, psychologist, and remedial reading/math teachers garner through screenings, evaluations and monitoring and translate that data into practical, classroom applications that a classroom teacher can use in a meaningful way. They also worked on how to make connections from the "therapy room" to the classroom, i.e. this is what I found to work during my remedial reading session with Johnny... here's what it looks like in your classroom.
In the afternoon, Dr. Brown and Ms. Rynski presented more information on Response to Intervention and provided RtI online resources teachers can go to and find interventions for any particular need. They discussed case studies they have gathered through their statewide work with children who have skill deficits. They demonstrated interventions a teacher could use to address skill deficits. The teachers broke out to a computer lab to find specific interventions for students in their class.
This practical and meaningful work will then be revisited at a future faculty meeting with their principal.