Tips for Making RTI Meetings Work

You and your team have done all the hard work.  You've spent weeks teaching interventions to your small groups of students.  Now what?  It's time to have an RTI Team Meeting to make those important decisions about what tier each student should now be placed into.

1.  Committee schedules a decision making meeting.

As the RTI coordinator in my school, I gather all the data, set the meeting date, make the schedule for the day and prepare RTI Decision Guide packets for our team.

When I make out our schedule for our meeting day, which lasts all day long for the committee, I work hard to not schedule meetings on a teacher's planning time.  We get substitutes to cover the classroom teacher so they can come to the meeting at their appointed time.  The substitute floats to each room at the scheduled times.

2.  Use data from interventions and universal screenings.

Once teachers have taught interventions we give our universal screening again to determine if interventions had any effect on student reading scores.  Teachers turn in their scores from this assessment to me.  I use the assessment scores plus all the data from the interventions to put together a packet of student data for our meeting.  All of the meeting guide pages are placed into file folders- one for each member of the committee.

3.  Use a rubric to guide decisions.

We use a rubric to guide our decisions as we determine what tier to place students into.  The rubric is there to help us use data to guide our decisions rather than feelings.  Of course, feelings always come into discussions, but data needs to be a bigger part of the decision.  I have found when we don't utilize a rubric, we dismiss fewer students because we want to continue helping everyone!  This is a good thought, but the goal of RTI is to accelerate learning and teach students to be independent learners.

RTI norms are a good thing to include in your RTI Decision Making Guide.  Teachers are passionate about their students.  It is important to remember to keep discussions confidential, encourage positive discussions and have respectful attitudes.

4.  Keep a Voting Record

After our committee has discussed a student's progress in RTI, looked at the data, and gotten input from the classroom teacher, we vote on what needs to happen next (stay in that tier, move down a tier, bump up a tier, etc...).  Our rubric guides us in these votes.  I record on a voting sheet the voting tallies for each tier.  This sheet is our documentation for parents, teachers, administration, etc...  I also use it as I put together RTI groups for the next cycle.

Besides using a Decision Making Meeting Guide, it is super helpful to keep progress documented on graphs.  Then use these graphs during your meetings. This documentation system is available K-5 with a different binder for each grade level.  

Meeting Your RTI Needs!

RTI Data Binders

RTI Resources