New Adventures: I've been Professionally Developed...

It was a strange sort of day.... most of the building was a various meetings in the morning, but the first grade team randomly had no where we needed to go (this NEVER happens). So we decided to set our own goal, sort of- Mrs. Principal was on board with it. I'll try not to ramble, but I used up A LOT of brain power today.

As we've been traveling through the RTi maze and figuring out what will work for our school, we seem to add one thing and five more issues/challenges are presented. I really think we are on the right track. One portion that we are working on is the grade-level piece. My old team in kindergarten used to trade students and had an elaborate system for targeting instruction for those who were struggling or came in at a deficit. Other grades who have been together a while were similar.

As a newly formed first grade team, we are still finding our way. I'm on our Student Support Team (helps teachers decide what interventions will help students as they move through the tiers or help decide if a special education referral is needed). Nature Girl (teaching partner's alias- see old posts) is on our Navigation Team (researches ways to boost student learning and reviews whole-school data, looking for areas to improve upon). Health Nut (my new pet name for my other teaching partner) is on the School Improvement Team, which is in charge of a bunch of things that I cannot be trusted with- like the budget! Between all three of us, we found ourselves with a large group of students who needed interventions (many of them multiple!). We found that our students were "intervention hopping" because the adults in charge were panicking and switching them too fast (not waiting 10-12 weeks for the data to show growth or not). We learned our lesson and worked even harder for them.

Anyway, Nature Girl had the idea of making a flow chart for our first grade interventions. I did some checking on blogs, cruised Pinterest, Googled it, checked Pinterest some more..... more Pinterest because I saw some cute things for the house.... I did eventually focus and find a model that we could start from and make our own. We tend to take things and make them better (and usually more complicated and fancy). Here is what we ended up with:

We started on the white board, but I like to fix and fancy.

I'm a visual learner, so the chart really helps me and I tend to put things in that form. Here is what it ended up like when we were done (about 2 1/2 hours of discussion).