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.

As Mr. Pettingill and Mr. Wymore discuss in the video, learning can go high-tech by using ELMOs, or completely “no-tech” with an activity as simple as doodling.

Since both gentlemen teach art classes, they find the use of ELMOs (Electronic Light-Modulated Overheads) helpful in allowing students to show their artwork to the class. By placing the artwork on a TV screen – removing it from the students’ hands and giving them a different perspective – it allows the “artist” to see his or her work more objectively, offering the opportunity for self analysis. The students have the opportunity to explain their work, while the class is invited to provide constructive criticism.

As I was talking about this with the teachers, I noticed that one teacher had drawn my portrait while I made my presentation. As a visual learner, doodling while I was speaking helped him link the content I was presenting with a visual reminder of the seminar. He could revisit this sketch at a later time, helping him recall the material we’d learned by linking the drawing with his “verbal memory” that came from listening.

As teachers, we often assume that doodling in class is “bad,” indicating that students aren’t listening to the material being taught. However, for visual learners, doodling can be that extra nudge that helps them in memorizing the material. Try this: let the doodlers in your class know that it’s OK to draw in their notebooks – but only if their doodles are related to the material being presented. After a period of time, do a “notebook check” – ask them what different drawings mean, or what was being taught when they created the doodle.

By taking what can be seen as a negative and turning it around into a positive, you can not only gain the trust of your students – but, by working with the students’ strengths, you can enhance learning and memory on multiple levels. Create a win-win situation!

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.

I know you’re all looking at that line and saying to yourselves, “Well of course I’m flexible; I fully intend to be.” However, I’m not talking about your own personality, though that is important too. I’m talking about what you plan together in the classroom. In essence, if you and your co-teacher can come up with some kind of a flexible plan that would meet the requirements of kids with an IEP and, at the same time, meet the requirements of the regular education kids, you’re going to have an easier time making it happen in your classroom.

Of course, this does require some planning on both of your parts, but even just snatching a few minutes during prep time or your lunch break can work wonders. You could also exchange phone numbers and e-mail so you can work together on projects. For the more technologically advanced, consider signing up for Google Wave, where you can actually collaborate on lesson plans together, in real time or whenever each of you has the time to get online.

In the classroom, have a signal planned between the two of you so that, if you need to switch things midstream, the kids won’t feel confused as to who is teaching the lesson.

The bottom line is, like I said at the beginning of this blog post, you just need to be flexible and then everything else will fall into place.

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!

credit for completing a vocabulary square using the ‘nerd word’.  This process motivates students to explore new words and to experience a larger vocabulary.

Another issue students often face is unfamiliar vocabulary on tests.  I discuss the importance of teaching test vocabulary in some of my seminars, but sometimes students need other options. Rachael Woolbright from Rockwell Charter High School in Utah suggests allowing written responses on multiple choice tests. If a student is unsure of an answer, they can write in another answer they think is correct.  This strategy also benefits extroverts who need to be able to process their answers more deeply than multiple choice testing allows.

Joelle Brummitt-Yale offers some additional vocabulary specific strategies in her article, “Effective Strategies for Teaching Vocabulary.”  Take a look and remember to consider the vocabulary you use  when working with your students.

1. In social studies, history, or Government, hold a Party Convention to teach the principles of the democratic process. One teacher in Nebraska organizes a party convention with affiliation to any major party, and then breaks his class up into as many two or three student state delegations as possible. After appointing one student as “the candidate,” students research their state and attend the convention as delegates of their state.

2. Another social studies or history example is to reenact major events, such as the Battle of Bunker Hill, or the Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. As the teacher, you might dress up and set the stage before acting such things out yourself, or you might engage the class more deeply by including them in the process.

3. Math and science concepts lend themselves well to music. Put your students into groups and have them create a song or rap to help remember the concept being discussed. I’ve talked repeatedly about the value of music in remembering information and this strategy bears inclusion again here. Bringing students into the process and allowing them to use music they love motivates them to participate and remember. There are a variety of resources available on my website, but a new resource I discovered recently is http://mrduey.com. Another teacher tuning their love of music to the subjects they teach.

4. Teachers have been using animals like fish, reptiles, and amphibians in the classroom for years to teach students about life-cycle, habitat, and responsibility. The problem with this idea is that, over time, the process becomes more chore than treat for students. Another approach, and something that many communities offer, might be to have service animals brought in during specific days or times. These animals are specially trained for a variety of tasks and service organizations are always on the lookout for ways to help train these animals by offering them opportunities to interact with others. This is an especially good activity for involving students with special needs and can be adapted to a variety of subject areas.

5. Having a cook-off or using food examples is an excellent way for students to apply concepts like fractions, U.S to metric conversions, geometry. Teach fractions using a pizza or cake. Show how a sandwich is a square until you cut it in half and it becomes two triangles.

6. One life skills activity that reaches students can be applied to a variety of teaching moments. Give students an ‘entertainment budget’ and have them use their ‘money’ to purchase a new gaming system with games and extras. Make the budget small enough to be challenging. Many students have no concept of the skills involved in managing money, but they will apply critical thinking to the mathematics with this sort of challenge activity.

7. Hold a mock trial with lawyers, a judge, etc. to examine the judicial process, act out current or historical events, or to deter students from making poor life decision. Many high school criminal justice courses use this activity, sometimes including field trips to actual courtrooms, but the idea can be applied to a number of other courses and ideas as well.