Thank you, Maureen!!  I will second that.  Let's call it Universal Design.
EVERYONE would benefit from explicit instruction and keep many from
"falling" - "failing".  ---Whatever we want to call it.  Check out the
Reading Assist Program in Delaware that trains volunteers in explicit
instruction to go into the classrooms and catch those who are "failing". My
friend, Ginger Biasotto, started this program because she had a severely
dyslexic son. Read her story, Educating Andrew: A Promise Fulfilled. ISBN
1-4241-0171-9.

 

Betsy Gauss

Lake Wales Literacy Council

Lake Wales, FL 33853

 

  _____  

From: learningdisabilities-bounces at nifl.gov
[mailto:learningdisabilities-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of Maureen Carro
Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 8:12 PM
To: The Learning Disabilities Discussion List
Subject: [LearningDisabilities 4237] Re: Response to Intervention (RTI)

 

Here is what I thought the "tiered system" of "Response to Intervention"
entailed:

 

1.  The classroom teacher notices the student is struggling in the
classroom.

2.  More specialized classroom help is provided as the first intervention.

3. If the student continues to struggle in spite of the classroom
intervention, he/she is referred to more intense, small group instruction.

4.  If the student still fails to "respond to the intervention", they  are
referred to one-on-one, very specialized, intense, instruction.  

 

My question:  Is this "fourth tier" struggling student not feeling like
he/she is failing???!!   It seems to me that they now have to "fail" three
times to get the right help!  

 

For heaven's sake..... why not give every child the direct explicit
instruction in the structure of the language..... starting with the
alphabetic principle, moving to syllables, words, phrases, sentences,
paragraphs, and discourse.... that is needed to successfully read and
comprehend text in the first place!  

 

 

Maureen Carro, MS, ET

Academic Learning Solutions

Alamo, CA 

mcarro at lmi.net

 

 

 

On Nov 3, 2009, at 2:17 AM, HKerr at aol.com wrote:





The RTI initiative was originally, I believe, aimed precisely at adopting a
different approach than the deficit one. The idea was originally, according
to articles by people like Jack Fletcher, specifically to enable the whole
environment to be considered and for us to move away from the assumption
that 'failure' must mean deficit; that we must always seek to find a fault
in the student, even his neurology. Recent literature seems to show that RTI
has been subverted and is now being deployed as a measure which is used to
'identify, a 'deficit' in exactly the way the discredited discrepancy
criterion was in the bad old days. For discrepancy read RTI, in other words,
which had not been the point originally, as I understood it.

 

Hugo

at: http://www.hugokerr.info <http://www.hugokerr.info/> 

"We're here to help each other get through this thing - whatever it might
be." (Kurt Vonnegut) 

----------------------------------------------------
National Institute for Literacy
Learning Disabilities mailing list
LearningDisabilities at nifl.gov
To unsubscribe or change your subscription settings, please go to
http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/learningdisabilities
Email delivered to mcarro at lmi.net

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/learningdisabilities/attachments/20091104/0115a696/attachment.html