RTI = personalized learning

The National Center on RTI defines the new buzzword as follows:

Response to intervention integrates assessment and intervention within a multi-level prevention system to maximize student achievement and to reduce behavior problems. With RTI, schools identify students at risk for poor learning outcomes, monitor student progress, provide evidence-based interventions and adjust the intensity and nature of those interventions depending on a student’s responsiveness, and identify students with learning disabilities.

In other words, RTI is personalized learning.  It’s what education should be, not a special program layered on top of an age cohort marching through a textbook.  Personalized learning currently lives around the fringes of the system–in special and alternative ed, in targeted tutoring, in online learning.  But soon we’ll just call RTI education.

Tom Vander Ark

Tom Vander Ark is the CEO of Getting Smart. He has written or co-authored more than 50 books and papers including Getting Smart, Smart Cities, Smart Parents, Better Together, The Power of Place and Difference Making. He served as a public school superintendent and the first Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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1 Comment

John Danner
11/22/2009

That's good to hear, we've been RTI schools from the beginning. It's only one of four ways we individualize/personalize, but the most effective.

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