Tier One of RTI requires the use of best practice, research-based teaching methods. Research- based strategies, as discussed in Robert Marzano’s Dimensions of Learning, are implemented in the differentiated classroom to provide the best teaching practices for Tier One, thereby reducing the need for interventions.

Given my experience teaching at the high school level as both a special education teacher and a co-teacher who worked within the inclusion model, as well as my experience coaching in middle schools and high schools around the country, I have become convinced that every secondary classroom needs to begin at Tier One: differentiating instruction so that all students can learn.  When teachers differentiate instruction, 80-90% of students are successful in meeting achievement benchmarks. (Hanson 2009)

1. The verbal linguistic, auditory delivery of information where students are expected to passively sit in their seats and take in information while trying to copy notes at rapid speed does not work for all students.
2. The students it does not work for are the students who are not responding to education and are doing poorly in the classroom as well as on their state tests. While this method may work for some teachers and some students, it does not work for the majority of our struggling student population.
3. A consequence of the lack of differentiation at the secondary level is that students who move on to college, whether to engineering coursework or technical school, primarily learned only one mode of studying. When they become college students and are met with challenging coursework, they often lack the study skills to support them in the more rigorous academic environment. This is why we often find that our most successful high school students don’t meet expectations at the college level.

The reality is that until we differentiate instruction at the secondary level, a basic requirement of Tier One RTI, we are shortchanging all our students: English-language learners, students with special needs, trade bound students, or students heading off to college.

Excerpted from RTI Strategies for Secondary Teachers by Susan Gingras Fitzell.

Regardless of how you look at the year, I hope that you return to your students this month with a bright new outlook and the resolve to reach as many of your students as you can.  To help with that, I’m very excited about my new, FREE, magazine, Terrific Instruction Tips and Tools.

This magazine is full of articles to help teachers, and parents, meet the goal of reaching all learneres. If you, or your campus, service center, or organization could benefit from this information, please contact us at 603-625-6087 and we’ll get some to you asap!

Here’s to a great year ahead, filled with all the success you wish, for yourself, your family, and your students!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

As teachers working in the trenches, we don’t often have the opportunity to step back and evaluate our performance, come up with new strategies to help students, or receive honest feedback on our work in the classroom. Sometimes the only feedback we get is based on standardized test scores or exam grades.

Imagine if you were armed with effective strategies for inclusion, memorization, and engaging students before your first day in the classroom.  These education majors from Carroll University had the opportunity to attend one of my seminars as part of their preparation for going into the classroom. Melissa and Whitney learned a wide range of strategies for teaching in a short period of time – even admitting they may use some of the memorization tips at the college level!

By exposing tomorrow’s teachers to strategies for success before they enter the classroom, we’re improving the quality of teaching in our schools and the chance for our students to thrive.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

In this video, Becky Ramirez from Odessa, Texas talks about a great idea she’s implemented in her classroom – student-built learning stations! Often we think of station teaching as a strategy for teaching elementary school students. I’ve always encouraged teachers to use stations for classes at every grade level, and Becky’s use of stations with her freshman English classes is a great example – with a “novel” twist.

Becky’s class is split into groups; as they work through a unit, each group puts together a station for their fellow students on an assigned portion of the material. One of the rules – and I think this is one of the most important things in implementing stations in the classroom – is that the Center must not be a worksheet. The point of station teaching is getting students involved with the material in unique ways, and worksheets just aren’t effective in engaging students.

Once the stations are ready, each group rotates to work on the activities at the other groups’ centers. Becky’s class had come up with some great ideas for stations; “I’ve had vocabulary quilts, I’ve had timed quizzes, we’ve had Twister with different things, Monopoly-based games on short stories.”

Like all group activities, grading can be a challenge. In Becky’s class, goals for each station are established from the beginning. Once students have finished their stations and visited each of the other stations, the class discusses each station’s activity, pointing out the things they really enjoyed and learned from and providing constructive ideas for how the stations could be more effective. Students grade each others’ work as well as their own, and the final grades take into account how well the students worked together in their groups. As new students come into the classroom, they see examples of previous students’ work so they know what’s expected of them when they create their own stations.

Many teachers don’t implement stations because they can take a considerable amount of time – and creativity – to put together. By allowing students to teach each other by constructing centers for their classmates, this burden is lifted and students become much more deeply engaged with the material as they think up ideas to teach their classmates. As Becky says, “Their ideas are much better than anything I could have come up with, and they love it because they’re ‘owning’ their products.”

In our November newsletter, we offered some examples of ways to motivate students by including them actively in the learning process. Some of my seminar participants have offered additional strategies for motivating students.

One thing teachers can do to keep students enthusiastic is to offer rewards. Ricki Miller uses a bubblegum machine filled with plastic containers. Each container has a slip of paper with a reward such as “sit with a friend for a day,” “homework pass,” etc. The students earn “coins” for chances at the gum machine.

Even the driest topic can be made fun by “acting out” the concepts being taught. For example, when Karen McKibbin of Niles High School in Michigan is teaching States of Matter, she arranges the desks in the shape of a beaker. Then all the students stand inside and behave as particles of a solid, liquid, or gas. The teacher provides the energy to change the particles to a different state.

The possibilities for turning real world situations and current events into a lesson are endless. A journalism teacher that didn’t give us their name teaches about interviewing by “acting out” a press conference. They play the part of the person being interviewed and the students practice being reporters. Then they write an article or press release based on the content of the press conference.

My former child and teenage self wanted to share something with you about homework. Something that may help you assign homework that will educate kids like me. You see, I have a learning disability. I was diagnosed with one in kindergarten, but I wasn’t wasn’t given an exact diagnosis. In adulthood I discovere it was something called NLD, Nonverbal Learning Disorder. Do any of your current students have it? My verbal IQ is so high that people expect me to do pretty well at everything, but a lot of my nonverbal skills are not very strong and cause me to struggle.

When I was in high school, I really felt how important it is to effectively teach students with learning disabilities. We had such great skills we could use to contribute to society and having to think in a different way gave us an important perspective to share with others. I know effectively teaching kids like me is challenging. So I thought I could help, since I’ve been there before as a student.

I didn’t look like I was struggling with most of my school work. I come off as intelligent and likable, and I always finished all my assignments. Some of your NLD students might be like me. So what can be done to help these bright students succeed at homework?

Here is a big thing to remember; as a person with NLD, each day of my life is filled with more mental and physical challenges than a day for most people without learning disabilities. Imagine what adding a challenging homework assignment can do to a child at the end of a challenging day. Sometimes, it pushes them over the edge to anxiety. As a student, I always did the same amount of homework as all my peers, but I spent more hours on it than a child should and I wasn’t learning as much from these long assignments as I could have been. Having shorter assignments in all subjects would have helped me learn from my homework. For example, some people with NLD have trouble with reading comprehension.

It is important for every child to improve their reading comprehension, but narrowing the work into doable chunks would have been much more affective for me. Have the NLD student read a few pages themselves (the number decided on ahead of time), then allow for books on tape (or Ipod) to catch the NLD student up to their peers.

One subject that was, and is, very hard for me is math. It took me a lot longer to go through each math problem than anyone else I knew. I would have learned math more easily if I were given fewer problems to do each night. Because of my strong verbal skills, I would have benefited if there were step-by-step directions – in words, not pictures – written down next to each problem. I would have then gone through the problem on my own, following the verbal directions. Five problems in a new concept a night would have been enough to start out for me. It is important for each child to be challenged to learn, but each child is different. Work  with the NLD child to find the amount of homework problems that they can do before becoming overwhelmed.

When assigning projects, leave space for students to be creative in their own way. When I was in middle school, we were given an assignment to make a Holocaust remembrance monument. Many students built things out of materials in their homes. I put together a “radio spot” monument. I recorded myself reading a speech I had written while playing a favorite song about making mistakes and learning in the background. This allowed me to do my project in words, the area I felt most comfortable.

I hope these suggestions help to make a happy classroom for you and your students who learn through words.

Sincerely,
Adult Anna Super

Anna is a freelance writer, taking on projects as varied as stories about her ups and downs with NLD and dyscalculia to copywriting projects that help businesses and organizations connect their products and services to their customers. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in journalism from Keene State College and was a staff reporter at the former newspapers The Connecticut Valley Spectator and the Argus Champion. Through her writing, Anna hopes to bring more awareness to learning disabilities, especially the little known ones she has, and help others with learning disabilities succeed in their lives. Anna can be reached at Anna.Super01@gmail.com.

There are too many factors involved in learning and too many ways of approaching the question of how learning happens to think that any one theory can answer those questions definitively. But one person whose work has proven really fruitful for me is psychologist Howard Gardner, who has distinguished eight or nine distinct types of intelligence (he’s still adding to his list), each of which benefits from different approaches to learning and communication in the classroom. Gardner’s types have proved tremendously helpful to my own work developing teaching strategies for working with the special needs of all children in the classroom (e.g., Special Needs in the General Classroom: Strategies that Make it Work, 2nd edition. 2010).

The two most familiar types of intelligence–the linguistic learner and the logical-mathematical learner–fit in well with our dominant models of teaching and recognizing achievement. The odds are good that many teachers, themselves, are examples of these types of intelligence.

On the other hand, some of the other intelligence types may be familiar primarily as classroom problems. There are the “bodily kinesthetic” learners who are physically hyper-active and potentially disruptive; the spatial thinkers who are likely to sit and daydream; the musical kids who are continually humming or drumming; the interpersonal learners who may be chatterboxes; the introverted intrapersonal ones who keep to themselves; the naturalists who are more tuned into the world outside the classroom than to what’s on the board or in the book; or the existentialist, who is inclined to ask annoyingly fundamental questions that have no place in the world of the three R’s, questions like “For what purpose are we here?” or “How do we fit into the world?”

As long as classroom instruction is primarily geared to reach only one or two of these different intelligences, a lot of kids will struggle to process the information being offered them and experience a serious disadvantage in achieving success.

Fortunately, though each person may have a dominant style, most of us actually possess some combination of these intelligences and the learning preferences that go with them. A lesson or project geared toward one learning style is not going to be inaccessible or unhelpful to the rest of the classroom. In fact, by including different kinds of lessons for different kinds of intelligences, teachers will be helping all students develop their multiple potentials, while making sure that no one falls behind or gets lost because they don’t learn well from one type of teaching.

This offers great opportunities for the development of new and varied teaching techniques. For each type of intelligence and learning, there is a corresponding new type of teaching.

We spent the day discussing teaching strategies and ways to involve all learners in the classroom. At the end of the full day session, Dr. Twomey got up and endorsed the ideas I had spoken about.  He expressed his desire to see the strategies that we covered actually being implemented in the classroom and was so passionate about that desire that he offered an incentive to his staff.  He asked that teachers nominate each other and identify who they saw actually using strategies to differentiate instruction in their classrooms. He promised that he would have periodic drawings  to recognize and reward those teachers for implementing strategies learned in the session.

I  learned late last week that Dr. Twomey had just awarded a FREE day off to each of three outstanding teachers (one from each district campus).  I’m not talking about extra prep time, or a sick day.  This administrator awarded each of these outstanding teachers a day off, with pay, and no strings attached!

So often administrators fail to follow through, or simply don’t know how to support their teachers, or motivate them to be the best teachers that they can be.   I could not pass up the opportunity to recognize Dr. Twomey and the tenacious support he offers his teachers and, in turn, the students of Havana School District 126.

Congratulations to Wendy Saylor, Music Teacher at New Central Elementary, Janet Barker, 5th Grade Teacher at Havana Middle School, and Barb Ramsey, Chemistry Teacher at Havana High School for their hard work and dedication to good teaching!