High schools are organized in a way that makes implementing “response to intervention”—a three-tiered instructional approach used with struggling students—especially complex, a report says.
Graduation requirements, instructional organization, school culture, focus, staff roles, and determining students’ involvement in the implementation of RTI, it says, are among the largest factors complicating management of a tiered instructional framework like RTI.
The observations come in a report from the High School Tiered Interventions Initiative, a collaboration by the National High School Center, the Center on Instruction, and the National Center on Response to Intervention.
Through visits with eight high schools around the country, the initiative’s team found that implementing RTI on the high school level required more than just taking the main elements used at the elementary school level and grafting them into the school framework. They concluded that intentional decisions must be made that take into account the labyrinthine structures that make up high schools, the content-area focus of high school teachers, the master schedule, and other reforms and initiatives being implemented at the same time.
