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BEST PRACTICES AT TIER 1, SECONDARY
honor of working with schools implementing RTI across all fifty states in the United States, every province in Canada, and many countries throughout the world. From Alabama to Australia and South Dakota to Singapore, we have seen these results firsthand in real-life schools facing diverse student needs, limited resources, restrictive contractual agreements, and challenging governmental regulations. At a time when success in school is no longer optional for economic and social stability, RTI provides the ongoing processes necessary to ensure every student learns at high levels.
Understanding Response to Intervention RTI’s underlying premise is that schools provide timely, targeted, systematic support early, rather than delaying help until students fall far enough behind to qualify for special education (Buffum, Mattos, & Weber, 2012). Commonly referred to as a multitiered system of support (MTSS), the three tiers of RTI traditionally take the shape of a pyramid, with each tier representing a different level of support based on student needs. See figure I.1.
Tier 3
Tier 2
Tier 1
Figure I.1: Traditional RTI pyramid.
Tier 1 of the RTI model represents a school’s core instructional program, in which all students receive effective instruction on grade-level essential curriculum. While Tier 1 should meet most students’ needs a majority of the time, invariably some students will need a little extra help to succeed in core instruction. This is the primary purpose of Tier 2—to provide timely, targeted supplemental academic and behavioral interventions to ensure that those students also succeed in mastering their essential grade-level curriculum. For students who enter the school year with significant deficits in reading, writing, number sense, English, and academic or social behaviors, Tier 3 supports provide intensive academic and behavioral remediation in these foundational skills. The goal of the RTI approach isn’t to move students from one tier to another; instead, RTI provides supplemental and intensive support in addition to core instruction. This approach recognizes that students who miss core instruction on essential