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.”

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!

Well, here’s the nitty-gritty: No matter what the research says, the label is often wrong. What I mean by that is: School districts who put two teachers in an ‘inclusive’ classroom can CALL it co-teaching, yet, it may not be CO-teaching at all. And, if it is called co-teaching on paper simply because two bodies are in the room and it doesn’t work, it’s decided that Co-teaching does not work.

Co-teaching (in name only) will NOT work when a general education teacher and a special education teacher are put together in a room and the special education teacher is constantly pulled for “other” responsibilities. It will NOT work when administration is not supportive and/or does not provide training AND follow through. It will NOT work when administration does not hold teachers accountable for best practice teaching methods. It will NOT work when administration holds an in-service for the teachers but does not attend (how can they possibly know how to follow through with the training if they were not there?). Co-teaching does NOT work if schools use it as a budget cutting endeavor. And, it will NOT work when teachers don’t want to cooperate and one or both deliberately sabotage the process. You see, the bottom line is: None of the above is co-teaching. It’s a weak attempt at something that might, at a glance or on paper, LOOK like co-teaching, but it’s not CO-teaching. Co-teaching means exactly that – Co, together, two, both – teaching.  Not one teacher teaching and one teacher holding up the wall.

I’ve been co-teaching and working with co-teachers since 1993. Co-teaching done WELL, scheduled WELL, received WELL, and combined with BEST PRACTICE teaching strategies to DIFFERENTIATE INSTRUCTION ******DOES******* work. It works a whole lot better than one teacher, all alone, trying to deal with a classroom of 30+ students at different ability levels. It works a whole lot better than self-contained classrooms where the bar is often too low for students to make significant gains. It works when school districts don’t pretend they are doing Inclusion by putting the lowest achievers with the students with special needs and filtering out all the academically successful students into more challenging classes (that’s not inclusion, rather, that’s one big, tracked, low-level class).

If a district has two teachers who are willing to truly co-teach and they are co-teaching together on a consistent basis and that co-teach marriage is respected by the “powers that be” so that the general education teacher isn’t alone half the time (pulling the special education teacher out for coverage, meetings, trainings, crises, etc. is commonplace) and those teachers are using best practice strategies and differentiating instruction, the co-teaching model works better than almost any other model available to quickly accelerate ALL, yes I said ALL, students’ achievement. When you tier lesson plans in a co-taught class, high achievers also have the opportunity to accelerate!

Does co-teaching work? YES, when the district commits to implementing it correctly and truly and honestly supports teachers in the process. YES, when the teachers’ personalities mesh and they are willing to use best practice strategies to reach ALL learners. (I heard an *expert* say once that personality styles don’t matter in co-teaching. I strongly disagree! I’ve personally co-taught with many personalities and when I’m working with my opposite personality type it’s like being married to an alien and consequently a very challenging. if not impossible, ride.) YES, co-teaching works when schools don’t segregate learners into classes of high, medium, and low and pretend it’s inclusion when they put the students with special needs in a tracked low level class. YES. it works when one of the two teachers doesn’t fight the process every step of the way but instead keeps an open mind and is willing to teach with best practice strategies. YES, it can work when done well. It can even work when done half well.

YES. Co-teaching, implemented correctly, works.

Caveat: This is the first time that I’ve written a blog article without editing it ten times, filtering it to make sure it does not upset anyone, over analyzing it for political correctness and being overly cautions that I don’t burn bridges. In the past several months, I’ve begun to feel that I need to speak my heart and voice and take the flack for what I believe and if it offends someone, so be it. Some things just need to be said. So, you might find commas in the wrong places, you might not like what I wrote, or you may agree whole heartedly. What matters most is that a message that I’m passionate about is addressed directly. The teachers I serve deserve passionate honesty. My heart goes out to the teachers in my audience today. Only ONE was sent with her co-teacher. How does sending ONE co-teacher of a co-teaching pair to an in-service help that process to work?  If you are going to do it, do it right.

Too many classrooms still rely solely on verbal linguistic teaching methods — lectures and verbal instructions delivered by one person standing in front of a roomful of more or less attentive children. Many kids can and will learn  in this type of classroom, but too many others will lose their joy of learning and start to dread going to school.

Differentiated instruction involves a flexible, dynamic, and interactive teaching model that doesn’t expect all children to learn the same way, at the same pace, with cookie-cutter results. Students learn the same content and standards based curricula, but the path to learning is much more varied and responsive to the different learning styles and levels of the students in the classroom. Students who learn best through words or who think in more logical-mathematical ways, or those who respond to visual cues as well as the more physically and mechanically gifted students can all be engaged effectively in learning when we differentiate instruction. We reach the listeners, the talkers, and the introspective thinkers.

Once the basic concepts are understood, though, there are many simple and effective techniques for implementing differentiated instruction in the classroom. Introducing pictures and images, movement-based exercises, cooperative projects, and color-coded instruction aids are four teaching strategies that target the special needs of diverse learning styles, while still benefiting all the students in the classroom.

In the weeks to come, I hope to talk some more about the background issues and practical methods I have explored in depth in the second edition of my book, “Special Needs in the General Classroom: Strategies that Make it Work  2nd Edition (2010).”*

Though it may be challenging at first for teachers to learn these new strategies, differentiated instruction has the potential to bring much greater satisfaction, and fun, back into the classroom for the teacher who embraces it as well as the children who will benefit from it.

One teacher explained that she taught her students the song, “What a Wonderful World,” by Louis Armstrong. One day, when everybody was wound up and excited, she started singing the song. The students stopped what they were doing and everyone joined in the singing. They loved the song, knew it well, and they were calmed.

An elementary aide taught her class “The Chicken Dance” during inside recess days. On a day when no one seemed to be listening during clean up time, she turned on “The Chicken Dance” and told the class they had until the end of the song to finish putting everything away. It worked so well that the dance became the song they played every time they had to clean up.

While the first idea supports my comments about the calming and focusing effects of appropriate music, the second strategy also illustrates the value of movement in the classroom. While the example comes from an elementary setting, giving students these little opportunities to move is essential to maintaining good order and discipline in the classroom.

Here in St. Louis (Clayton, actually). Checked in, shuttle driver took me to Whole foods – did groceries, going to polish my co-teaching presentation before bed. Tomorrow St. Louis, Tuesday: Springfield, MO, Wed: Kansas City, MO, Thurs: Minneapolis, MN, and Friday, FARGO!!!

Co-teaching Coaching Last Week

Last week I was working with Permian High School and Odessa High School in Odessa, TX. I love being in the classroom. Both high schools are making great gains in their co-teaching efforts. Not only did I get to work with some awesome teachers and administrators in Odessa, Texas, I attended a Permian High School Football ‘send-off to the state championships’ bon-fire. I also attended an Odessa High Pep rally. They both made it to this past weekend championships in El Paso and they both won! Experiencing West Texas Football and West Texas friendly hospitality is truly delightful. The week flew by.