Response to Intervention (RTI) Action Network

The National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) is a national, not-for-profit center founded in 1977.  The mission:

NCLD works to ensure that the nation's 15 million children, adolescents and adults with learning disabilities have every opportunity to succeed in school, work and life.

Its latest initiative is the Response to Intervention (RTI) Action Network.   The Director, Kathleen A. Whitmire, Ph.D., explained the need for the RTI Action Network:

The adoption of RTI will of course require some deep, system-wide changes.  While change is hard, and sometimes uncomfortable, we can reach our goal of providing high-quality instruction to all students if we work collaboratively and collectively.  It is paramount that state and local policies and practices evolve in order to help inform building-level leadership.  School leadership in turn will be able to galvanize school staff to embrace the necessary changes in roles and responsibilities and help facilitate the breaking-down of barriers between general education and special education.

The tagline for the RTI Action Network is: The Information You Need to Take Action, The Networking You Need to Be Successful.

The RTI Action Network's website is http://www.rtinetwork.org/, which has sections on Learn More About RTI, Get Started In Implementing RTI, Include Essential Components, Connect with Others, and Professional Development.  The organization also offers an email bulletin of upcoming events.

The first online talk will be on Managing Ongoing Student Assessments, with Stanley Deno  April 23, 2008, 1-2 p.m. EDT.

Progress measures have become a central component of the Response to Intervention (RTI) approach. Contemporary assessment has shifted focus from describing differences between students to measuring their progress toward important educational outcomes.

Curriculum-Based Measurement procedures are used to monitor basic skills growth, to identify students at risk of learning difficulty, to evaluate efforts to prevent and remediate low achievement, and to aid in making instructional decisions to accelerate learning.

Join our expert, Stanley Deno, Ph.D., best known for his research leading to the development of Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) progress monitoring procedures and their use in the RTI model, as he answers your questions on CBM.