January is a good month to be thinking about getting off to a clean and organized start to the year. Teachers become experts at organization. If they don't, the amount of paperwork that crosses our rooms would become a chaotic mess!
We have just finished up our first cycle of RtI. It is time for me to gather the data, create graphs, and organize a full committee meeting. I keep all the student data in RtI student files.
These little black boxes are very important to my job of Keeper of the Files! All current RtI students in tiers II and III have a file that I record what has happened during the student's RtI "career". If their file is here in the black boxes then they are currently in RtI.
Once a student has made enough progress for the committee to vote them out of Tier II or Tier III, the student's file moves to this file cabinet drawer. I used to have the files in a crate. Over the years, the files of students moving out of tier II and III have grown too much for that and have now taken over this drawer. It is pretty full too. Soon, I may need an entire cabinet for files.
I keep the old files as a record as to what help and which interventions students have had. It comes up numerous times in meetings with teacher or parents, what help has this child had, to what degree, and how successful were they. The teachers in special education frequently ask too when teachers ask questions or parents request testing. It is good information to have at your fingertips!
In each student's RtI file there is a cover sheet recording when they entered RtI each time and what tier, the scores at the beginning and the end of the tier and the decision made from the committee. I also include the graphs and assessments for each cycle and the parent notification letter.
This is a better shot of the cover page to the student file. When we began RtI, it required lots of paperwork for the teachers and for me- I am the one who keeps track of everything and coordinates it all. Over the years, I have whittled that down as much as I possibly can. Classroom teachers do not have time to fill out reams of paperwork just to get a child some help. And I don't have the time to sort through it all either. Helps us both out!
So my question to you today is what does your school keep in their student RtI files? I am always interested in how other schools organize and manage their files and the whole RtI system.
I like the fact that you're keeping the paperwork for teachers to a minimum. Pages and pages of forms are difficult to sort through when all you want is some extra help for a little person.
ReplyDelete❀ Tammy
Forever in First
To the best of my knowledge, it is the thrice-yearly MAPs scores and the WADE scores from the Wilson tests...plus perhaps any running records that provide substantial evidence? Our school doesn't DRA, and ESL is the only dept. that does Fountas and Pinnell benchmarks so I'm not even sure!
ReplyDelete-Maria
Everyone deServes to Learn
Wow! You are soooo organized with your RTI materials.. It looks like you have your system down to a science. Love your blog. I'm a follower and I would love you to check my new blog out too.
ReplyDeleteMelissa
Keep Calm and Love First Grade
I am going to be taking on the job of creating a better and more streamlined RTI program for my school. I love what I see you doing. Are all the file pages from DRA or did you create them yourself?
ReplyDeleteCongrats Jeanette on getting to head up the RtI for your school! Thank you for your kind words about how we are doing it. Most of what you see pictured in the student record file are things I created for my school. They are not from DRA. I am working on creating files like those you see this summer. I almost have the kindergarten one completed. I will have it in my TpT store when it is done. I will probably write a blog post on it when it is completed to let people know. Thank you for coming by!
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