RMHS Model Blog

Howard and Charles will be presenting at the Triple I conference on Saturday, November 21 at the Sheraton in Chicago at 1:30.  If you are attending we would love to have you stop in and see our presentation.  Otherwise, if you have board members or administrative leaders attending, this would be a great opportunity for them to learn more about Response to Intervention.  The program is dedicated to RTI at the secondary level.

I found a great link this morning.  It was completely by accident as I was working with our EIT to iron out our referral process to the team.

The link is full of RtI documents at the Mandan School District in North Dakota.  The site is definitely worth checking out as you develop the structures and tools for your RtI system.

Let me know if you have any other good sites that we can share.

Thanks for reading.

Charles

Great news!!!

We have been given the go ahead to offer CPDU credit to our site visitors.  When you arrive, let Mark Koch, our site visit coordinator, know that you are interested in the credit and we will make sure that all the paper work is completed.

We’re currently fully booked until January.  Get your reservations in.

Thanks for reading.

Charles

We haven’t been posting for a long time.  I hope, now that the start of school has settled in, that we will be able to get things up and running again.  The website is in serious need of revision.  We have added a great deal to our program that we would like to highlight in the blog.

We have continued to offer site visits.  We had a great visit in September and we are already overbooked for October and November.  We have schools registered up through February, so it seems that people are interested in what we have to share.

With this October’s site visit  we will start to introduce some new faces and add more of the “RtI” side of things to our presentation.  Already, most of the afternoon of the presentation is strictly RtI.  The morning is primarily about using teams.  Since we believe you have to have highly functioning teams in order to do Tier 1 it still is RtI, but not as direct.

I’m leaving tomorrow for the RtI Innovations Conference.  I’ve heard great things about this conference and I look forward to sharing what I learn.

We regularly get questions from people who have visited us.  I hope that we can have some of these discussions via the blog posts so that there can be a broader sharing.  Please feel free to post your questions here.

Check in soon for an update.  Thanks for reading.

Charles

The newspaper Edweek has compiled a nice list of resources on  RtI.  I recommend that you take a look.

I regularly get a little resistance to the idea that we should prepare all students for college.  Actually, I advocate that we should prepare all students to successfully complete college.  The reasons in terms of personal and public gains in both the financial and societal realms are overwhelming.  Life for everyone is better as we produce more college graduates.  Despite my vision, I know that there are a number of students who rather go directly go into the workforce.  While there is research that shows that a large percentage of these students actually go back to school for some sort of training, ACT has solid research suggesting that these students need to be taught the same standards as those needed for attending post-secondary education.  The study is not new, but apparently needs to be reiterated.  The study Ready for College and Ready for Work:  Same or Different? does an excellent job pointing out the overlap of college readiness and work preparedness skills.

The Executive Summary provides a comparison of ACT questions and WorkKeys questions.  They function as a nice reinforcer of the need for skills in those who enter the work force immediately after high school.

We recently had a nice conversation with several individuals from the regional ACT office who indicated that more and more employers are beginning to require WorkKey scores for employment.  While this will help tremendously with motivating students for the second day of the Prairie State Assessment, it underscores the importance of a common standards based curriculum for all students.

Thanks for reading.

Charles

The use of professional protocols are going to be essential in the quest to reinvigorate our profession.  There are clear protocols in medicine, public health and engineering, but there are few in education.  Protocols enable professionals to continuously improve their practice and be as efficient as possible along the way.  This summer the Midwest Principals Center is putting on an excellent workshop by Jocelyn Booth and Sue Horan.

As a disclaimer, I am friends with both Jocelyn and Sue and I’m on the MPC Governing Board.  While I had the pleasure of working with Jocelyn and Sue while they were at RMHS and D214,  I wouldn’t recommend them if I didn’t passionately believe in the value of their workshop.  They are true professionals that have methods/protocols that can truly improve your school’s professional practice.

Thanks for reading.

Charles

We are holding the the last site visit of the year on April 16. Recently, we turned down a number of schools due to the fact that we had already overbooked our space. We’ve been able to make some arrangements and now have space for about 150. We won’t hold another site visit until next September.

If you’re interested, please use the normal site visit request process.

Thanks,

Charles