The RtI Leadership Team met to strengthen the model and program across schools. Each school had an opportunity to describe their RTI model in terms of the structure, teams, and the range of intervention services. We read the article, “The Power of Collective Efficacy” by Jenni Donohoo, John Hattie, and Rachel Eells. We discussed the ways in which we could strengthen and deepen the RtI work district-wide and developed a shared understanding of the processes and work across schools and the ways the work does – and doesn’t – cohere as one system. The article suggests that the focus in schools needs to be on student learning as opposed to student compliance, a core belief in South Orangetown Central School District.
Rachel Eells’s (2011) meta-analysis of studies related to collective efficacy and achievement in education demonstrated that the beliefs teachers hold about the ability of the school as a whole are “strongly and positively associated with student achievement across subject areas and in multiple locations.” We used a discussion protocol, To what extent do we have collective efficacy as it pertains to our RtI work as a system? What do we need to work on? What can we build on?
We then mapped the RtI Program using a system mapping tool called, How To Draw Toast. Each school team first drew, how to make toast, and then created a visual representation of our RtI program and processes in each school and district-wide. We discussed what we noticed about the nodes and links from the drawings, what they represent, and identified how to strengthen the connections and links within and across schools.
