For the past couple of days I have been attending the Response to Intervention Conference in Anchorage. Because much of my job involves work with finances and legislative issues, I found my time at the conference focusing on instruction and interacting with teachers from around the state to be refreshing. I am pleased to learn that KPBSD, by comparison with other Alaska districts, is in pretty good shape with regard to our RTI processes. As always however, I recognize areas for improvement. One of the concerns that I heard during the three days was that some teachers are too quick to refer a student who struggles to the RTI process without thoroughly reflecting on whether their core content instruction can be adjusted to better meet the student’s learning needs.
I know that our focus on effective instruction has helped our teachers improve their skills. A next step on our path of improvement is using video to more thoroughly analyze the effectiveness of instructional practices. One presenter showed the benefits of video as a way to show student engagement. The first clip illustrated the limitation of the traditional practice of a teacher offering open ended questions with a few students raising their hands. This was contrasted with a video that showed a high level of student engagement with students working in groups to solve problems or to teach each other. For teachers, it is a big risk to have your instruction viewed in this way. But when it is done in a non-evaluative manner, teams of teachers can collaborate on what they see and offer suggestions for improvement.
Using video to improve instruction
For the past couple of days I have been attending the Response to Intervention Conference in Anchorage. Because much of my job involves work with finances and legislative issues, I found my time at the conference focusing on instruction and interacting with teachers from around the state to be refreshing. I am pleased to learn that KPBSD, by comparison with other Alaska districts, is in pretty good shape with regard to our RTI processes. As always however, I recognize areas for improvement. One of the concerns that I heard during the three days was that some teachers are too quick to refer a student who struggles to the RTI process without thoroughly reflecting on whether their core content instruction can be adjusted to better meet the student’s learning needs.
I know that our focus on effective instruction has helped our teachers improve their skills. A next step on our path of improvement is using video to more thoroughly analyze the effectiveness of instructional practices. One presenter showed the benefits of video as a way to show student engagement. The first clip illustrated the limitation of the traditional practice of a teacher offering open ended questions with a few students raising their hands. This was contrasted with a video that showed a high level of student engagement with students working in groups to solve problems or to teach each other. For teachers, it is a big risk to have your instruction viewed in this way. But when it is done in a non-evaluative manner, teams of teachers can collaborate on what they see and offer suggestions for improvement.