An Effective Response to Intervention System Requires Highly Effective Teachers

Using a crosswalk between the correlates of Effective Schools Research and tenets of an effective Response to Intervention (RTI) program will allow a multidimensional team of stakeholders that includes parents or guardians, to create an efficient and effective RTI system.  Such a system promotes equity in quality within schools committed to the pursuit of learning for all.  Subsequent alignment of the district's non-negotiable goals with individual school needs and experiences (Marzano & Waters, 2009) should expand rather than limit the district's clearinghouse of research-based and success-proven strategies and interventions.  

While there is a danger to prescribing interventions in a limiting fashion, collecting and archiving RTI anthologies have the potential for providing a clearinghouse of research-based and success-proven strategies and interventions.  Promoting such a clearinghouse of identified successes ensures professional development is available to optimize access, review, and implementation of a range of interventions.  Thus, RTI can actually enrich the highly effective  teacher’s professional practice through defined autonomy.

A core competency required for effective implementation of RTI interventions is the ability to correctly collect, analyze, and utilize data.  Frequent monitoring of student progress, and adjusting as indicated by results, is a correlate of continuous school improvement within Effective Schools.  This correlate requires teacher competency in collecting data, evaluating results, and being an honest consumer of the resulting data.  

Both pre-service and in-service teachers openly admit to the difficulty of monitoring student progress to inform instructional decisions.  The inter-relationship between the identified core principles makes the pursuit of a hierarchy subjective at best and futile at worst.  The correlate of frequent monitoring and subsequent adjustment drives the core principles for implementing RTI.  The ability to collect data, evaluate results, and be an honest consumer of the resulting data promotes the correlate of frequent monitoring and subsequent adjustment.  Teacher proficiency with data must therefore become a professional competency. 

When teachers identify and prescribe an intervention, they often have difficulty accepting the need to change (adjust) if the prescribed intervention proves ineffective.  Too often the failure of the intervention is perceived a personal failure of the initial prescription, which can then delay the necessary adjustment.  For this reason, a district and school is well-advised to consider the following six ideas for successful development of an effective RTI system: 

• Encourage participation by key stakeholders during planning and implementation.
• Elicit strong administrative support in staff development, instructional integrity, and data collection.
• Provide in-depth staff development with mentoring, modeling, and coaching.
• Begin follow-up trainings at the beginning of each school year.
•  Distribute a manual outlining procedures and materials.
•  Build Problem Solving Models including RTI into school schedules and the student improvement process (Lau, Sieler, Muyskens, et al, 2006).

Additionally, Schools of Education and Alternate Route Teacher Preparation Programs need to ensure graduates are able to collect data, evaluate results, and be an honest consumer of the resulting data.  There needs to be an expectations for utilizing statistics and data analysis during coursework for prospective teachers.  Effective districts also need to complement this evolution through in-service professional development on collecting data, evaluating results, and being an honest consumer of the resulting data.

To cite:

Anderson, C.J. (August 31, 2016) aA effective response to intervention system requires highly effective

teachers.  [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/

Reference:

Edmonds, R. (1979). Effective Schools for the urban poor. Educational Leadership, 37,

15-24.

Lau, Sieler, Muyskens, Canter, VanKeuren, & Marston (2006).  Perspectives on the use of the

            Problem-Solving Model from the viewpoint of school psychologist, administrator, and

            teacher. Psychology in the Schools, 43 (1), 117-127.

Marzano, R. & Waters, T.(2009).  District leadership that works. Bloomington, In: Solution

                Tree Press

Accreditation Standards: Promoting effective leadership and optimizing student success

Graduate programs intending to develop highly qualified educational leaders must seek to address Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) accreditation standards (2013) to identify and develop competencies that optimize educational leadership.  Teacher preparation programs must be responsive to accreditation standards, intended to promote effective leadership and optimize student success within schools (CAEP, 2013).  Following de facto consolidation into the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP, 2013), more than 900 educator preparation providers currently participate as providers currently accredited by either the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) or the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) CAEP is now the sole specialized accreditor for educator preparation.  

For the purpose of the accreditation of educator preparation providers, NCATE and TEAC are now subsidiaries of CAEP.  NCATE and TEAC maintain their recognition by the U.S. Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA).  Future accreditation will be under CAEP, effectively phasing out the subsidiary councils over time (CAEP, 2013).

Founded in 1997, the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving academic degree programs for professional educators that will teach and lead in schools, pre-K through grade 12.  The TEAC accreditation process forms the basis for CAEP’s Inquiry Brief Accreditation Pathway, identifying the educator preparation provider’s case that it prepares competent, caring, and qualified professional educators (TEAC, 2013.  The process requires the educator preparation provider present evidence to support its case.  The accreditation process examines and verifies the evidence (CAEP, 2013).

The standards used by the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) help frame teacher education and educational leadership programs at institutions of higher learning.  Educator preparation providers include traditional institutions of higher education, as well as alternative pathways such as residency programs (CAEP, 2013).

CAEP, NCATE, and TEAC all expect faculty to hold a terminal degree or possess exceptional expertise while modeling high quality instructional and professional practices.  The qualifications of faculty and teaching quality must align with measurable benchmarks of an effective educational program.  “Teacher quality—knowledge and effectiveness—is the number one school based factor in student achievement” (NCATE, 2003, para. 9).

To sustain success and seek improvement, faculty within educator preparation providers should systematically evaluate colleagues and collaborate to optimize professional development (NCATE, 2003; TEAC, 2003).  The mindset driving sustained success and continuous improvement should be if better is possible then good is not enough.  The following five standards and two recommendations guide the endeavor toward CAEP’s goals to raise the performance of candidates as practitioners in the nation’s P-12 schools and thereby raise the stature of the entire profession.  Pursuit of these goals requires teacher preparation programs support any claims of quality in each of the following:

Standard 1: Content and Pedagogical Knowledge

Standard 2: Clinical Partnerships and Practice

Standard 3: Candidate Quality, Recruitment, and Selectivity

Standard 4: Program Impact

Standard 5: Provider Quality Assurance and Continuous Improvement

Recommendation: Annual Reporting and CAEP Monitoring

Recommendation: Levels of Accreditation Decisions (CAEP, 2013, p. 2)

Pursuit of the goals identified by the CAEP standards and recommendations require educator preparation providers willingly reflect, monitor, and adjust programs to meet increased expectation (CAEP, 2013).  The following six professional standards reflect the significant alignment between TEAC and NCATE expectations:

1.     unit governance and resources,

2.     faculty qualifications, performance, and development,

3.     candidate knowledge, skills, and dispositions,

4.     assessment system and unit evaluation,

5.     field experience and clinical practice,

6.     diversity.

The primary professional standards guide the educator preparation providers to willingly reflect, monitor, and adjust programs to meet increased expectation of the accreditation process.  Yet, teachers exhibit varying awareness of the standards (Rodenberg, 2006), so it is uncertain how TEAC, NCATE, or CAEP professional standards promote relevance to actual professional development.  Educators would benefit from increased awareness of pedagogical research and best practices that may inform their practices.  In this regard, schools and districts will need to provide high quality, research-based staff development relative to effective practices (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001).  As life-long learners, teachers need to have effective instruction that includes modeling, practice, feedback, and reinforcement (Joyce & Showers, 2002).  These opportunities can be evaluated by stakeholders in relation to school climate using the Five P structure based on Invitational Education theory (Schmidt, 2007).

In a meta-analysis of studies that examined aspects of Highly Qualified Teachers, Darling-Hammond (2004) codified five quantifiable attributes that frequently appeared to correlate teacher qualifications with student achievement.  These included:

1.     General academic and verbal abilities;

2.     Subject matter knowledge;

3.     Pedagogical knowledge as reflected by teacher education coursework or preparation experiences;

4.     Teaching experience; and

5.     Qualifications measured by teacher certification, which included most of the preceding factors.

Quality educators exhibit qualitative characteristics.  Specifically, an educator’s intuition correlates student actions to effective teacher reactions or proactive responses.  This requires teachers know about children, pedagogy, curriculum, thereby making these elements effectively, efficiently, and logically, interact (Darling-Hammond, 2004).

It remains unknown how emotional intelligence skills and behaviors in the workplace relates to intuition.  Stronge’s (2002) meta-analysis focused upon "the teacher as a person" (p. 12).  The reviewed studies identified instructional and classroom management strategies as key to teacher effectiveness, usually emphasizing the teacher's affective characteristics more than their pedagogical practice (Stronge et al., 2003). 

The measurement of teacher performance remains difficult.  Teaching candidate credentials are generally easier to observe and analyze.  Teacher dispositions identified with highly qualified teachers include collegiality, self-reflection, collaboration, interactive skills, and reflective adjustment to personal and professional practice (Miller & Davidson, 2006).  These characteristics may be essential for promoting the defined autonomy and effective collaboration evidenced within highly effective schools (Marzano & Waters, 2009).  Informal and formal assessment of these dispositions during teacher preparation and educational leadership programs will continue based on accreditation and certification requirements (CAEP, 2013; NCATE, 2010; TEAC, 2010).

References:

Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (2013). CAEP Accreditation

               Standards. Retrieved from http://caepnet.org/caep-accreditation-standards/

Darling-Hammond, L. (2004). Standards, accountability, and school reform. Teachers College Record, 

               106(6), 1047–1085. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9620.2004.00372.x

Joyce, B.R. & Showers, B. (2002). Student achievement through staff development.

               Arlington, VA: ASCD. ISBN: 0871206749

Marzano, R., Pickering, D. & Pollock, J. (2001). Classroom instruction that works: Research-based 

              strategies for increasing student achievement (first ed.).  Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision 

              and Curriculum Development.

Marzano, R. & Waters, T.(2009). District leadership that works. Bloomington, In:

               Solution Tree Press

Marzano, R. J., Waters, T., & McNulty, B. A. (2005). School leadership that works:

               From      research to results. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and

               Curriculum Development. Retrieved from:

               http://marzanoresearch.com/products/catalog.aspx?product=13

Miller, K.W. & Davidson, D.M.(2006).What makes a secondary school science and/or

               mathematics teacher “highly qualified”? Science Educator, 15 (1), 56-59.

Rodenberg, J. K. (2006). How teachers define "highly qualified" for themselves and their profession. 

                 (Order No. 3218194, University of San Diego and San Diego State University). ProQuest 

                 Dissertations and Theses, , 158-158 p. Retrieved from 

                 http://search.proquest.com/docview/304913901?accountid=7374. (304913901).

Schmidt, J. J. (2007). Elements of diversity in invitational practice and research. Journal

                of Invitational Theory & Practice, 13, 16-23. Retrieved from:

               http://www.invitationaleducation.net/pdfs/journalarchives/jitpv13.pdf

Stronge, J. H. (2002). Qualities of effective teachers. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision 

               and Curriculum Development. ISBN 0871206633

To cite:

Anderson, C.J. (July 31, 2016) Accreditation standards: Promoting effective leadership and optimizing 

                  student success  [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/