Member-only story
I was dreading this meeting. You see, the life of an educator is pretty cushy to the lay person. Summers off, school vacations, national holidays off, don’t have to work weekends, and of course, you only work until 3 o’clock. My friends who aren’t in education like to remind me of this all the time. But the real story is that real work gets done with kids at school. Some of it goes smoothly and some of it is rough. This meeting was about a kid where the learning was a little bumpy.
RTI (another educational acronym) is a team based process in which teachers receive support in improving learning for students about whom they are worried are not meeting standards through conventional means. In other words, a student isn’t learning and a teacher has run out of tricks to support them.
I was dreading this meeting because I had not done all of the work necessary to support the meeting about the kid. Extra support services were put in place, I had met with the teacher- but didn’t come up with a goal to address any weaknesses, and now we had to talk about what to do next. I felt like crap because I knew I had not completed my responsibilities-most notably, developing goals and supporting the teacher…
