Working Backwards to Move Forward

Educators have been using the ideas first forged by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) for several years now. Their work, known as Understanding by Design has been used to redesign unit and lesson plans. In some instances, their ideas have been used to rewrite entire curriculums. However this process can be daunting. Often, Wiggins and McTighe can become quite lofty idealists. This is why I turn to a more practical approach after the initial work using the UBD methods has been completed.

As teachers, we are ultimately responsible for assisting students to learn more than they knew the day before and work towards them retaining the essentials. A way to do this is to incorporate the ‘backwards’ design approach while developing the learning targets. Learning targets the essential knowledge, reasoning, skills and products would like students to know, understand, or demonstrate to show understanding. Identifying these will help in the development of the essential summative assessments that will measure student a student’s achievement.

Another step is careful construction of these assessments of learning. If the assessments are constructed in a way that can measure student achievement in multiple ways, i.e., selected response, short response, extended response and/or a performance, then a clearer picture begins to form regarding whether or not the student has exceeded the standard (A), met the standard (B), below the standard (C) or not yet meeting the standard (D). A zero, or a grade of ‘F’ indicates that the student hasn’t learned anything.

If these assessments can be used as pre-assessment tool then assessments for learning, or formative assessments, can be used to monitor student progress towards meeting the standards, then we can begin to identify student needs early and thus provide the necessary assistance right away. Once all of this is in place, a teacher who becomes worried about a student can confer with his or her colleagues that teach a similar group of students (same grade or same curriculum) or reach out to other colleagues outside of the grade or curriculum for additional ideas. In other words, having a professional learning community (PLC) that exists to support the teacher’s desire to have his or her students succeed is an integral part of this process.

If these steps don’t work, then the school or district should have a referral process (RtI) that can review what has and hasn’t worked for the child and offer recommendations to support the child in the classroom. This can be based on the teacher’s record-keeping of the summative and formative assessments. The very last resort would be to pull the student out of the class.

By working backwards like this to reach the individual child, we as educators can begin to make huge strides as we move forward with student progress and support.

Why did RtI Cross the Road?

What is the connection between Response to Intervention (RtI), a content teacher, reading and responding to a student’s needs? No, this isn’t the punch line to a joke. In order for RtI to function, content area teachers, no matter what the content is, have to learn how to accomplish three things:

• Assess each students’ reading and writing abilities as they apply to that specific subject.
• Implement interventions as a classroom teacher to assist those students who did not meet the content reading and writing standards.
• Alert someone after when a student does not respond after multiple attempts at intervening.

RtI is all about providing students with what they need currently rather than waiting until students are assessed using standardized tests. It begins in the classroom and the majority of the work is accomplished via the classroom teacher.

First, content teacher teams need to identify specific reading and writing learning targets they feel the average student in their subject specific classroom should be able to meet at different points throughout the academic year.

For example: “Students enrolled in Physics will be able to successfully comprehend 25% of a content-specific reading passage by the first quarter.” For more on learning targets, please visit http://rhshistory.wetpaint.com.

Second, with the learning targets determined, teacher teams are ready to develop their assessments. The assessments can measure both the content-specific learning target and the reading and writing targets the team has developed. The assessments can be analyzed to identify students who fall well below the identified target. Between the major summative assessments that demonstrate what a student has learned, teachers can monitor the progress of struggling students using formative assessments. Formative assessments are used as a way to help identify specific areas of strengths and weaknesses for students. These assessments should only be between the teacher and the students as means to intervene and correct the problem. They should never be published as an official grade.

If teachers are having difficulty knowing what to do with struggling students, they need to confer with their colleagues and other professional learning community partners. Gathering ideas and suggestions from other teachers and trying multiple interventions in the classroom should all take place first prior to the last step.

The final step is to seek help and guidance from a problem solving team that can provide additional resources and interventions that a general classroom teacher would not normally have access. These could be computer assisted programs, aid-assisted interventions, or teacher-assisted interventions that could take place during a study hall.

In all, RtI begins with the classroom teacher, but can only be effective if the classroom teacher can determine what the student needs at the time.