Alternative Reflection for 10/3/09

George Batsche Seminar
I had the opportunity to hear George Batsche speak in Bloomington, IL on October 21st. He is from the University of Southern Florida and has a PhD in Psychology. He’s known for his research on Response to Intervention and its effectiveness. He turns educating students into a pure science. The best thing about Dr. Batsche is the fact that he doesn’t sugar coat anything! The topic of his seminar was Response to Intervention: Advanced Implementation Issues. He discussed how important the PRINCIPAL and internal coaches were to implementation. Considering RtI is supposed to be up and running in every district by the 2010-2011 school year, I felt like there should have been more administrators there. Unfortunately, many school districts around me have hired RtI coaches. This is a good start, but the coaches A.) aren’t trained well and B.) they don’t have the power to make the decisions of a principal. Critical decisions like scheduling, funding and reallocating personnel need to be made by a principal or superintendent in order for RtI to work well. One of the best key points he made was for teachers to Teach…Review…Modify…Instruct! This is a new concept for many teachers, even those coming out of universities within the last few years. Many teachers are stuck in the rut of Teach & Grade, those students who get it, good! Those who didn’t, we can always call them learning disabled! Disclaimer: ALL teachers MUST be given time in order to reflect on their teaching and analyze their data.