Diagnosis: The Missing Ingredient in RTI Assessment

I found this articule to be very accurate when it comes to how the RTI process is handled in schools today. Being a special education teacher I find myself dealing with struggling readers and teachers that want to help them on daily basis. My first grade team and I are constantly assessing our students and monitoring the progress of our students. As the articule states "some students continue to struggle, even when they receive very good classroom instruction" this statement hit a nerve this week with my team as we looked at our DIBELS scores after the past couple of months of interventions with some of our struggling readers. It was very apparent to us that some of the interventions being used were not meeting the needs of the students.

The articule pointed out that "It should be a very high priority for teachers and specialists to gather specific information about individual students to make appropriate instructional decesions". So now that brings my team and I to the point that we have to look at each student that is struggling and try to diagnose where their problems are. The Template for Analyzing Student Data and Creating Profiles might be a valuable tool that we could posssibly use to help plan for some of these students. Using this we would be able to examine more closely  the data that we have gathered on our students and apply that information toward the next step for each particular student. 

This articule showed how one team did that very action for their students and they benefited from their teachers plans. It only makes sense that finding the root of reading difficulties and then developing a plan to attack that root is the way to solve some reading problems. It is also a way to determine those students that are in need of a more indivual or differentiated instruction than peers and  the RTI process stays in place until the team determines what the plan for the student will be. My team and I are following these steps as we plan for our students. We have high hopes that by the end of this school year that we will see some major improvement in scores.