Educational Tiers / When to use Formative Assessments

     In education 350, a guest speaker, Dr. Mitcham, came in to talk to us about the laws and policies we have been learning about in class. The major thing that we covered during this class period was the three tiers that make up Response to Instruction (RTI). This used to be called Response to Intervention, but Dr. Mitcham explained that it has been changed to Response for Instruction because it involves much more than intervention.

     The first tier in the RTI model represents 80% to 85% of the students in the classroom. These students learn best from general class instruction and do not need extra support. Although they do well with regular class strategies, this does not mean that they will not need differentiated instruction and class work. These students may have struggles that are addressed within group work so that the assignment can be differentiated and the teacher can give them more one on one instruction. Tier two represents 15%-20% of the class that does not gain enough understanding even from differentiated instruction. These students need extra intervention, and are monitored more for growth. This tier may include students who are pulled out of class for extra instructional time, but this should not be during the instruction that is being taught in the classroom. This intervention is to be used alongside tier one general education. One common example of this, according to understood.org, would be small group interventions (link at bottom). Lastly, tier three represents the 5% of tier two students that are still not able to learn from the general education and intervention. These students may be placed in special education or exceptional student programs, and they are given intense interventions that are used alongside the tier two intervention and the tier one general education. The most important thing to remember about the three tiers is that they build on each other. Students are not taken out of tier one and placed in tier two, they are given both strategies and instructional methods. 

     This relates directly to standard 4a of the North Carolina Teacher Candidate Standards, which states that "Teachers know the way in which learning takes place..." We, as educators, need to make sure that we pay attention to our students in order to provide them with the instructional methods they need to learn best. In my future classroom, I plan to take the time to consistently evaluate my students and listen to them during instruction to make sure the teaching strategies I am using works for them. Once I identify students that may need instruction past differentiation, I will make sure they are given the accommodations that will best promote their learning. This relates to our discussion in education 410 perfectly, which was about when formative assessments should be used. In order to make sure we know how our students are doing and when they need extra help, we must formatively assess as much as possible. If we formatively assess several times during the same lesson, and alter the lesson during instruction based on these formative assessments, we should be able to tell at the end of the lesson whether a student truly does not understand a subject from a whole class perspective and needs additional support. From this point, we may need to continue to assess students in order to provide data that supports our findings in order to get them the accommodations they need. 

https://www.understood.org/en/school-learning/special-services/rti/at-a-glance-3-tiers-of-rti-support