Simplifying Response to Intervention Quotes

“What Is Wrong With This Student?”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“If there is one thing that traditional special education has taught us, it is that staying compliant does not necessarily lead to improved student learning; in fact, the opposite is more often the case.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“How Do We Stay Legal?”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“How Do We Implement RTI?”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“It is not necessary for district leadership to make a choice between structural and cultural change; both are absolutely necessary. But in many districts, efforts to uniformly implement RTI place a greater emphasis on compliance with paperwork and protocols than on high levels of engagement and ownership among its teachers. RTI is as much a way of thinking as it is a way of doing; it is not a list of tasks to complete, but a dynamic value system of goals that must be embedded in all of the school’s ongoing procedures. This way of thinking places a higher priority on making a shared commitment to every student’s success than on merely implementing programs.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“when arbitrary, predetermined amounts of time are allocated to achieve specific learning outcomes, students who need additional time to learn the concept will be left in the wake as the teacher races to cover all the material.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“How Do We Raise Our Test Scores? This is the most pervasive misguided (and misguiding) question. While high-stakes testing is an undeniable reality in public education, this fatally flawed initial question leads to the wrong answers for achieving deep levels of student learning.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“Our current reality dictates that every student succeeds in school, and so we must face the facts: our current system has never produced these results—not in the past, not now—nor will it in the future.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“We know one thing for certain: we are never going to get there doing what we have always done. Our traditional school system was created in a time when the typical educator worked in a one-room schoolhouse and served as the only teacher for an entire town. Today it is virtually impossible for a single teacher to possess all the skills and knowledge necessary to meet the unique needs of every child in the classroom.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“response to intervention (RTI) is our best hope to provide every child with the additional time and support needed to learn at high levels. RTI’s underlying premise is that schools should not delay providing help for struggling students until they fall far enough behind to qualify for special education, but instead should provide timely, targeted, systematic interventions to all students who demonstrate the need. To achieve this goal, we remain equally convinced that the only way for an organization to successfully implement RTI practices is within the professional learning community (PLC) model.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“Collaborative teams of teachers need to have laser-like clarity about where they are going. They need to filter out all distractions and focus on each individual student’s mastery of what has been determined to be essential. Once developed by the team, the essential learnings should be shared with students in order to engage them in their own learning as much as possible.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“If 80 percent of children can become successful as a result of first, best instruction (Batsche et al., 2005), shouldn’t district leadership devote 80 percent of its efforts toward improving Tier 1 concentrated instruction, rather than focusing most of its time, energy, and resources on “plugging holes in the dike”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“Students who feel connected to adults at school are more authentically involved in their learning (Osterman, 2000).”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“highly engaged learners contribute greatly toward a scholarly and productive school climate (McCann & Turner, 2004). To be optimally successful, students must be authentically engaged in their learning and intrinsically motivated.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“A school’s core instruction in behavior should result in at least 80 percent of students being able to articulate what is expected of them, because these behaviors have been taught, actively supervised, practiced, and acknowledged.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“approximately 80 percent of students receiving a well-instructed, research-based curriculum should experience success as a result of initial core instruction in the classroom.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“collaborative teacher teams should build assessments to assess narrow learning targets rather than the entire standard.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“Assessments should be conducted in such a way that students feel that assessments are being done “with” them and “for” them, rather than “to” them.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“Using formative assessment, teachers can: • Determine what standards students already know and how well they know them • Decide what changes in instruction to make in order to help each student be successful • Create lessons appropriate to the needs of students • Group students for intervention and enrichment • Inform students of their own progress in order for them to set goals”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“Formative assessment is intended to generate feedback that can be used to improve and accelerate student learning (Sadler, 1998).”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“Once a standard has been unwrapped into a number of learning targets, teachers can build their assessments at the target level, rather than attempting to assess an entire standard.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“The dialogue needs to ensure that team members (1) are interpreting the standard in the same way, (2) have agreement on the level of rigor and what might constitute proficiency, and (3) have identified the prerequisite skills and knowledge necessary for students to be successful in mastering the new standard.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“Collaborative teams of grade-level or course-alike teachers should discuss, debate, and dialogue about which standards are essential, using all of the resources and criteria just mentioned.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“every collaborative teacher team ask and answer the following four questions: What is it we want our students to learn? How will we know if each student is learning each of the essential skills, concepts, knowledge, and dispositions that we have deemed most essential? How will we respond when some of our students do not learn? How will we enrich and extend the learning for students who are already proficient? (DuFour et al., 2010)”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“If teachers systematically examine their professional practice and their impact on student achievement, the results of such reflective analysis will finally transform educational accountability from a destructive and unedifying mess to a constructive and transformative force in education. (Reeves, 2004, p. 6)”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“To cover all of this content, you would have to change schooling from K–12 to K–22. The sheer number of standards is the biggest impediment to implementing standards” (in Scherer, 2001, p. 15).”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“Teachers need to know the learning intentions and success criteria of their lessons, know how well they are attaining these criteria, and know where to go next in light of the criteria of: “Where are you going?” “How are you going?” and “Where to next?” (Hattie, 2009, p. 239)”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“Collaboration by invitation rarely works. Considering that the professional learning communities process is endorsed by virtually every national teacher professional association, it is difficult to understand why a teaching professional would desire or expect the right to work in isolation. More importantly, if a teacher is allowed to opt out of team collaboration, then that teacher’s students will not benefit from the collective skills and expertise of the entire team. If the purpose of collective responsibility is to ensure that all students learn at high levels, then allowing any teacher to work in isolation would be unacceptable.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“The key criteria are: (1) it must be frequent, (2) it must be during a time that the faculty is paid to be on campus, and (3) it must be mandatory that every staff member participate.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles

“At its core, RTI is about creating a collective response when students need additional support, rather than leaving this response up to each individual teacher. This process is predicated on the staff having the time necessary to work together. When collaborative time is not embedded in the contract day, teachers are too often forced to make a choice between meeting the needs of their students at school and their children at home, or between making teaching their career and making it their entire life.”
― Austin Buffum, Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles