Major Challenge #2: Jill Gronwick, Kelly Doherty, and Jamie Vogenthaler

Scenario One
As a Special Education teacher, you will play an essential role in a school
system's ability to address the instructional needs of its students. Imagine that
you work in a school that administers a Universal Screener to students three
times a year. Below you find two student scenarios with included data that will
allow you to make appropriate instructional decisions.
Brandon [ download case ]
Katie [ download case ]
You are to select one of the case studies, either Brandon or Katie, and complete
this scenario. Please be clear in the instructional choices that you made, and be
sure to respond to each question posed in the case study.

1) Dear Parents of Katie,
Each year we administer a Universal Screener three times to the students.
So far we have administered this test twice. Katie has been identified for
inclusion in the RTI (Response to Intervention) program in Reading/Language
Arts. She is being considered for SPED services because the results of the
Universal Screener show she is performing below grade level expectations and
has made less than average growth. The attached graph shows the comparison
of these scores. For Test A, Katie scored 1389, and the class average was 1435.
For Test B, Katie scored 1382, and the class average was 1450. By the end of
the year, the end of the year target is 1485. In order for Katie to attain the end-of-
year score, we are proposing a specialized and individualized program. This
program would provide her with supplemental Reading/Language Arts supports
so that she can eventually be scoring the same as her peers. Specifically, areas
that we want to focus on are using illustrations and phonics/word analysis
because these were areas that a large percentage of students got correct and
their level of difficulty was considered easy. Additionally, we want to focus on
helping Katie understand the main idea as well as effective grammar and word
usage. We are still planning on integrating Katie into the general education
classroom as much as possible while providing her with these supplemental
Special Education services to further enhance her learning. I hope that you
deeply consider this suggestion. Feel free to contact me with any questions you
may have, I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,
Teacher




2. According to the data provided, an area that needs to be focused on is the
Role of Illustrations. Katie had answered three questions under this subskill
incorrectly, and they were marked at an easy level. A majority of the students in
the class answered these questions correctly, which also puts Katie below class
average for this subskill. This gives this subskill high demand to focus on and is
the reason why we chose this one for Katie.

3. Intervention Plan
Day 1: For the first day, Katie will be working with both a SmartBoard and
a tablet. For her 15 minutes on the smart board, she will spend 5 minutes
drawing scenes from lines of a story that are read to her. This will give her the
independence of using her own imagination to interpret text. For the last ten
minutes, there will be a SmartBoard activity provided with set images/objects in a
word bank and a setting image. Katie will be read a line of text describing the
scene and she will have to use the objects provided to interpret that line of text.
The objective of day one is to understand Katies current understanding of
illustrations (http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/3/7/) as well as build
her comprehension through provided works.
Day 2: For the second day, Katie will begin by completing another round
of the SmartBoard activity to readdress what she learned the day before. Then
Katie will use another SmartBoard activity called Illustrate a Story
(http://exchange.smarttech.com/details.html?id=7b3e9e73-c6e0-44d1-a6ed-
8f0ef3a7aca5) . This activity will help her develop skills pertaining to ideas,
thoughts, and feelings.
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The objective of day two is to help Katie retain the information of
understanding illustration from Day 1, as well as work on other reasons people
use illustration such as to show emotion.
Day 3: For the third day we will start with the Illustrate a Story activity on
the smart board again for 15 minutes. Then Katie will work with a tablet to build
her Expression to Illustration skills again. The activity that will take place is that
she will be read different emotions and asked to display it through a selfie. She
will take a selfie displaying that emotion. Then the images will be pulled up on the
SmartBoard in a random order and Katie will be asked to caption the emotions
that the different selfies express.
The objective of this day is to make sure she understands that illustration
has more than one meaning. The meaning of illustration that is worked on in this
day is emotion.
Day 4: Day four Katie will run through the already taken selfies one more
time and asked to caption them. Then she will use a tablet to find certain
descriptive phrases. She will be presented a phrase such as hot pink flamingos
drinking water and have to find three pictures of this scene and be asked to
describe which one best illustrates this phrase.
The objective of this day is to show her that there are different levels of
illustration and that it can become elaborate.
Day 5: On day five she will cover everything she has learned thus far. She
will do ten minutes of the word bank activity, ten minutes of Illustrate a Story, ten
minutes of the Selfie activity, and ten minutes of the find the best illustration
activity. Then for the last five minutes we would have her explain how there are
different depths of illustration. If a line in a text is Katie is happy she could
simply show a picture of her smiling. But she could also show a picture of her
jumping into the air as she exits school for the last time that year and is ready to
start summer vacation.
The last and final day is to show that she is to make sure she understands
the usage of illustration, but also the depth it entails. Illustration helps the author
convey their message to the audience. So what I see may be different from what
you see, and thats okay. But I want to show you what I see.

4. Assuming the expectation for the probe is 80%, this intervention plan is
working with Katie. However, we would like to continue the intervention so Katie
can continue to make progress. Below is a letter we would send to the RTI
committee with a graph attached to further show our reasoning.

Dear RTI Committee,
I would like to continue the intervention plan with Katie. At the start of the
intervention Katie was getting less than half percent of the questions correct on
her probes (4/10 or 40%). Over the weeks, however, she increased more and
more every week. On the final two probes she was reaching the expectation and
getting 80% of the questions correct. If I were to continue the intervention it is
expected that Katie will continue to make progress as evident in the past 4
weeks. The line graph provided shows that over time she increased by up to 40%
in 4 weeks, something that would have been very hard to attain without specific
intervention. I hope you take my recommendation into great consideration. I look
forward to hearing from you shortly.

Sincerely,
Teacher



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