International Teacher Education Conference 2014 1

International Teacher Education Conference 2014
collaboration. In the language of institutional ethnography, these define “ruling work” for teachers and others.
For these administrators, the need to realize in practice these five points impacted how they monitored,
supported, and evaluated work within their schools. As noted by one of the district-level participants (Johnson),
“We use performance data of students to determine if we’re being effective or not. If [it] is not effective then the
district needs to intervene with the building, give more support and directives.”
With respect to intervention practices, these were characterized with respect to both within- and betweentiers.
We found that these administrators described practices within tiers in the direction one might expect given
the way they have been defined in the literature: Tier 1 emphasized core curriculum in the classroom; Tier 2
emphasized interventions designed to assist at-risk students in realizing better access to the core curriculum,
employing various published curriculum; and Tier 3 was largely special education services designed to serve
identified students. We noted an emphasis on reading and math in the way RTI was discussed, with behavioral
issues mentioned much less often. The expression “double dipping” was used to describe Tier 2 interventions,
addressing both the situation of a student needing a “refresher” and the student with an apparent skill deficit. In
the language of institutional ethnography, these participants were describing the “work practices of everyday
life” of teachers and others.
The decision processes that were described by these participants asserted that teachers were to use
quantitative information, collected at all three tiers, especially information derived from regular benchmark data
collected three times per year on all students, and more frequently gathered progress monitoring data for those
students receiving interventions, using the District-approved AIMSweb ® system. However, the discussion of
decision-making processes is where we were most likely to observe what could be described as “fault lines” in
the vernacular of institutional ethnography: places where the RTI model and actual practices sometimes
expressed discrepancies or processes in flux. These included uncertainties over the optimal objective criteria for
making intervention change decisions; evidence of reliance in some situations on subjective data, a practice that
may have varied in degree between schools who were at different points in their own development; issues that
arose over the interpretations of appropriate Tier-level services when a student transferred between schools; and
questions about the meaning and validity of progress monitoring data as a measure of growth in students
receiving interventions.
Finally, the participants emphasized collaboration among general educators, between general educators and
intervention service providers, and between general educators and both special educators and related service
providers. When presenting the processing interchanges that occurred, the participants described how
collaboration became more intense as a student moved from Tier 1, to Tier 2, to Tier 3, and how there were
increasingly more and different players as one moved between these same tiers. The participants suggested by
their comments that collaboration had been happening before RTI entered the picture, but that its quality and
frequency were now greater as a function of the RTI expectations.
Discussion
We offer three interpretations of our own, derived from our conversations with these five administrators.
First, the implementation and evolution of RTI in this District can best be described as a reshaping and extension
of past practices rather than an abrupt implementation of something quite new and different. What seemed most
apparent to us is that past practices around teacher decision-making, interventions, collaboration, and student
placement have become more standardized, now occurring with potentially greater fidelity and with increased
accountability as a result of the introduction of an RTI framework. It is perhaps in the formalization of data
collection that we saw the most dramatic change with respect to the reported day-to-day activities of teachers
and others in this District. Yet, we wonder about the reach of data-based decision-making in relation to
instructional interventions and student placement: Can data gathered on student progress be used to address
critical questions of service adequacy in the larger picture of relationships between general and special
education? Or, do these data simply drive a cycle in which interventions become more or less intense and/or
more or less isolated when benchmark and progress monitoring data yield differential results? We also wonder
about what would have been reported by these same administrators if instead of Tier 3 being mostly about
special education it had been more of an extension of general education, as described in some models (e.g.,
Burns & Scholin, 2013).
Second, we were uncertain about the degree to which teachers providing intervention services, most notably
at Tier 3, were attentive to student success in general education, as opposed to focusing mostly on skill
remediation data as indices of their productivity. This issue lies at the heart of the RTI concept, because it
appears to us that what could really distinguish RTI from more traditional special education approaches is
reliance on general education progress and not necessarily on skill remediation per se for ascertaining school and
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