For the past couple of weeks, I have been implementing the interventions the team suggested for Pablo, and so far things look promising. We have been doing daily phrase reading, building his fluency until he is able to read the connected sentences smoothly. The intervention materials are wonderful. At the top there is a list of the multisyllabic words in the sentences. The sentences below are separated into phrases by dashes. He practices reading the list of multisyllabic words first. Then I have model for him how to read the phrases smoothly. If he makes an error, I wait to see if will self-correct. If not I point at the word, and he attempts it again. If he struggles again, I tell him the word. I let him finish all of the sentences, and then I have him repeat the ones where he made an error. Our goal is 100% accuracy. Once he has reached that goal, I have him read the sentences without the dashes (which I typed up). We continue practicing the whole sentences until he is able to read those with 100% accuracy as well.
We chose this intervention because we determined that Pablo's fluency issue was not related to major phonics gaps or phonological processing. Rather, he seems to struggle with fluency in connected text. The special education teacher suggested this phrase-reading intervention to help Pablo to mentally break the text into manageable chunks.
In all honesty, after the problem-solving meeting I felt skeptical. I had been doing daily repeated readings with Pablo practically since the beginning of the school year, and it hadn't worked. I feared this would be another intervention that would fail him. Secretly, my hope had been that he could join the special education teacher's daily reading group, thinking this might be the extra support he would need. But the assessments we gave him did not indicate that he shared the needs of the Tier 3 intervention group that our special education teacher runs. Instead, I continued to be on my own for helping him.
However, after two weeks of the intervention, I am beginning to feel hopeful. I gave Pablo an ORF assessment after about a week and a half, and he improved by 2 words, which is exactly on target for my rigorous rate of improvement (ROI) of 1.5 words per week. Even more exciting, his reading level has grown from a 12-18 in the past month (using the Rigby PM assessments - similar to the DRA) because he has finally been able to meet the fluency target of 95% accuracy on all the assessments I have given him so far. His comprehension has always been strong, and he is able to retell the text with all the important details and answer questions about the story. Previously, it was always his fluency that prevented him from passing the assessments.
It is great to see his fluency growing in multiple assessments, and Pablo is proud of his recent progress, as is his mother. He is still below grade level, but this intervention seems to be working. I am hoping that this improvement continues until Pablo catches up, or at least gets close to where he needs to be. We'll see.
RTI and Special EducationMuch of the controversy surrounding RTI is related to its role in identifying students with disabilities. Educational psychology professor emeritus, Cecil R. Reynolds, expressed criticism in an interview of the use of RTI in identifying students with learning disabilities. He noted that students may not respond to intervention for many different reasons. A learning disability is just one of many possibilities. However, he claimed that some states are too quick to assume that if a student is not responding to intervention, then they must have a learning disability. According to Reynolds, the original intent of RTI was to provide early, targeted intervention to prevent students from falling behind -- and not to be a diagnostic tool. Now the two purposes have been intertwined. "We make a mess of it," he said. In 2011, the federal Office of Special Education responded to concerns that RTI was slowing the process of serving students with learning disabilities. Although federal regulations mandate that states permit RTI to be used as part of the criteria for identifying students with learning disabilities, on January 21, 2011, the Office of Special Education issued a memo that a student's involvement in the RTI process cannot delay the evaluation process for a student suspected of having a learning disability. However, the controversy continues. Some parents and parent advocate groups complain that students with learning issues are given ineffective interventions or that the next steps for when intervention doesn't work are not clear. More than these complaints, parents name inconsistency in implementation as their number one concern.
