RTI - response to intervention
Next week our RTI process will be audited by an outside agency.  I don't like be audited because I know that everything we do at school is never documented on paper.  What educator has time to document everything we do.  Yes, I try most days to document interventions and strategy discussions about students; however, no general protocol is followed or process really in place.  We have one rule, treat every student like they were your own.  That rule has teachers intervening with all students.  You could say that our classrooms are already Tier 2, so it's very hard to implement something new for tier 3 because they are already doing everything they can possibly do for that student.
I become frustrated because I know that we should be making the next move toward understanding the science part of education, but we do not.  Collecting data with 24 8 year olds in a classroom can be challenging when you are learning new content to teach.  Teachers need more time to practice stop and listen to feedback like a sports team practices or a broadway production prepares for a performance.
Last year we used Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov to add some new techniques to their tool box.  I could walk the building last year and see teachers trying the techniques, I talked with them to see if they thought they were helpful.  I did everything an administrator could do to support them.  Well this year two new programs have been thrown at them Daily Five and the new Common Core standards have made them forget to work on those techniques.
With those ideas in mind, now through in a behavior problem on top of someone trying to understand how to design their classroom with educational science.  My analogy is what happens at the World series if someone runs on the field, that person is surrounded by security and removed from the field.  However, in the classroom, we have to learn how to differentiate or create a new behavior plan for that student.  Don't think of this as a compliant, because I love it.  The public and the people creating a lot of policy, my opinion, do not understand how challenging teaching is today.
Our best teacher by the art method has trouble filling our a tier 2 strategy sheet and our best teacher by the science method makes parents mad monthly.  Then I spend my time correcting those things instead of pushing forward new ideas.  It's like asking the University of Alabama to not have a football team next year because they have such a great team.  If you're very successful at what you do, but you want me to do something differently with less time and money.
I'm trying to start a dialogue that isn't about complaining but balancing science and art to make teaching work today.  That involves using technology, creating rti - researched based tool boxes, classroom mgt techniques, and discussing the fine points of the art of teaching.