Responsive Teaching and RTI

The podcast episode I’ve listened to is entitled “Responsive Teaching and RTI” where  Dr. Gaston Weisz focuses on the approaches of RTI and speaks about RTI approach in education. The deficit model is contrasted to the strength based model.

Doctor Gaston  mentions that RTI(Responsive Teacing Intervension)which is a strength based model is becoming a mandate in the USA but parents know little about it or actually know nothing. They may have different policies that didn’t fulfil their expectations and this makes them become sceptical.

First of all our intervention should be scientifically designed:

• Use evidence-based intervensions
• Use logical model to assess difficulty students are having
• Set goals effectively and monitor them

RTI has a potential to change the system in a significant way

Why focus on it in education?

Before answering this question Dr. Gaston compares RTI and a deficit model.

The deficit model is used first to understand what’s going on with the child, what’s he lacking: the educational background, parent support, motivation, educational disability etc. Second, it  identifies who has the disability and provides services.

How to justify the need to provide support? It should first of all determined that the child has something deficient and then only try to intervene.

Why is deficit model criticised?

May be the deffect is not in the child but in the environment, this may prevent children from needing support, make them feel confused and neglected.

Cultural difference can also mislead.His normal behavior may seem to be disturbing because of the assumption that the child’s culture is non-traditional and ours is a traditional one. As a result expectations may seem faulty. 

And the last critical point is that deficit model is not effective so it doesn’t work.

So the rate of the effectiveness of any model is measured by looking whether it works or not.

The different approach that Dr. Gaston stands for is based on the strength.We should care about what children can do but not just what they cannot.

The assessment shouldn’t be beyond the child’s ability but it also cant be too simple as being not challenging it can turn the pupil off. Realistic goals should be created to attain certain skills.

The correctness of the intervention is also important, so we should be careful enough to correct or rechange the intervention if necessary.

The solutions of the problems should be logical, the goals should be objective not subjective. That is: the improvement goal should be realistic and appropriate for the child.The concept “current level + 1” should be applied.We should also develop a hypothesis to see if it worked well and the results should be considered very quickly to change the intervention type in case it is not relevant or doesn’t correspond to the child’s needs. As different kids need different interventions.

There are kids who like to be in the centre of attention( attention-centred approach), on the other hand, there are kids, who prefer to be independent(Self-monitoring approach).

Teacher expectations also do a lot. They have a great effect on the pupil’s further development.The higher the expectation, the higher performance pupils are expected to have.

RTI has a great deal of promise and it also needs much attention.

RTI can be applied in teaching English. It will encourage  students not to be afraid of the variety of dialects as students are evaluated based on their strength, that is they will be asked the English they know, but not the English they don’t know.

As for me David Crystal  is also for RTI approach, as he doesn’t consider not knowing the varieties to be a sort of a problem to help the students to overcome.