Communicating to Parents

The National Association for School Psychologists (NASP) offers this article in order to provide resources for school psychologists to simply and effectively explain the RTI process to parents in terms that they may be able to understand. It is vital that parents be included in this process in order to ensure that it is working at its full potential. This being said, parents can often get lost in the jargon that may be presented to them at case conferences or other meetings with the school psychologist.

This article is a fast and information-packed read that goes through the essential components of the RTI process, including its benefits, the roles parents can play within it, and how it all plays into the process of determining special education eligibility for students. I also found it helpful that the article provides simple definitions of key vocabulary relevant to the topic that school psychologists can refer to in order to prevent parents from becoming confused. These key terms include:

• Response to Intervention (RTI) is an array of procedures that can be used to determine if and how students respond to specific changes in instruction. RTI provides an improved process and structure for school teams in designing, implementing, and evaluating educational interventions.
• Universal Screening is a step taken by school personnel early in the school year to determine which students are “at risk” for not meeting grade level standards. Universal screening can be accomplished by reviewing recent results of state tests, or by administering an academic screening test to all children in a given grade level. Those students whose test scores fall below a certain cut-off are identified as needing more specialized academic interventions.
• Student Progress Monitoring is a scientifically based practice that is used to frequently assess students’ academic performance and evaluate the effectiveness of instruction. Progress monitoring procedures can be used with individual students or an entire class.
• Scientific, Research-Based Instruction refers to specific curriculum and educational interventions that have been proven to be effective –that is, the research has been reported in scientific, peer-reviewed journals.

Curriculum Based Measurement (CBM)

Every effective reading intervention, no matter which of the five core areas of reading it is designed for, needs to be efficiently monitored. Data should be collected by the school psychologist in order to monitor the student's progress throughout the course of the intervention.

These two websites, created by the University of Oregon, provide reading probes that can be used routinely during a reading intervention to collect data.

EasyCBM provides school psychologists with several types of early reading probes. The materials can be accessed for free by visiting the demo account or by registering with the site for free. Available measures include Phoneme Segmentation, Letter Naming Fluency, Letter Sound Fluency, Nonsense Word Fluency, and Word Identification Fluency. The picture below depicts a sample reading probe obtained from this website.

The DIBELS website provides materials for administering and scoring a range of early reading skills. Again, materials on this website are free with registration. Available measures include Initial Sound Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation, Letter Naming Fluency, and Nonsense Word Fluency.

21st Century Resources

Recent advances in technology have led to great opportunities for teachers and school psychologists alike to stay in contact with colleagues, mentors, and other helpful individuals they have come into contact with through the use of online social networks. Social networks not only allow for continued contact, but also keep those familiar with up to date findings. They also serve as support systems and a great reference when looking to find a quick answer. These resources include Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter, Skype, GoogleWave, and many others.

Youtube.com is also a great source for finding quick and interactive answers to questions that school psychologists may run into in helping students of all ages to read. For example, this video displays a reading specialist's description of her role in reading RTI at Iron Springs Elementary School in Utah.

Stacy Hurst, the reading coordinator depicted in this video, is affiliated with the Reading Horizons reading program. This program has their own channel on Youtube.com that offers many videos on reading instruction methods similar to the one depicted here. This is just one example of a quick resource that can easily be found by visiting Youtube.com.

In the news...

 BNET, which is the CBS Interactive Business Network, published an article entitled Exploring Reading Specialists’ Collaborative Interactions with School Psychologists: Problems and Possibilities.

This is a lengthy and in-depth article that explains how school psychologists and reading specialists can work together to help improve children’s reading.  It stress the importance of ‘effective collaboration’, discusses what reading specialists do, what school psychologists do, and what the two professions can do together.  An excerpt from the article stating reasons for this collaboration can be seen below:

1. de-compartmentalize specialized knowledge, to foster triangulation and integration of knowledge

2. strengthen assessment and intervention efforts in the area of reading

3. build a triadic relationship that fosters continuous, pedagogical improvement and supports regular educators' intervention efforts

4. strengthen prevention efforts in the primary grades

5. encourage reflection of professional practices in the schools

6. coordinate diagnostic assessments for the purpose of obtaining better integrated and more comprehensive data

7. co-facilitate progress monitoring of reading disabled children

8. meet standards set forth by professional accrediting societies

9. co-design and coordinate interventions

This article also discusses some potential problems that may be encountered when the two professions attempt to work closely with each other.  The information here would probably benefit school psychologists and reading specialists most, but would also be useful for teachers, administrators, and parents to have a better understanding of the process.

Reading help from the White House

The Department of Education provides free booklets about reading improvement and brochures at the request of parents.  This website provides the Publication ID and mailing address where parents can request free items from the Department of Education.  Many of the booklets support the RTI process and can help parents get involved.   The items are available in English and Spanish.  Below are the items listed as available for parents to request for free:

Reading Tips For Parents (Bookmark)
Suggests activities to help children become effective readers. This two-sided bookmark for parents who want to encourage their child to read is printed in both English and Spanish.

Reading Tips For Parents (Booklet)
Provides tips to parents to help children be ready to read and ready to learn. This brochure gives advice to parents about how to know a good early reading program, how to put simple strategies for creating strong readers into action, and how to practice the five essential components of good reading. Also provided is information about the No Child Left Behind Act, and contact information. English/Spanish.

Guide For Reading: How Parents Can Help Their Children Be Ready to Read and Ready to Learn (Brochure)
Provides tips to parents of young children regarding how to prepare them for reading and learning. This brochure lets parents know how important it is to be involved with their children by reading to them and preparing them for reading and learning on their own. English/Spanish.

Homework Tips for Parents: No Child Left Behind (Booklet)
Provides general tips to help parents become involved in their children's homework, as well as more specific advice on helping with reading and math homework. English/Spanish.

Partnership For Reading: Bringing Scientific Evidence To Learning (Booklet)
Outlines the Partnership for Reading's goals and activities relating to the dissemination of findings from reading research to educators, parents, policy-makers and others. This brochure also includes descriptions of the three agencies that form the Partnership for Reading and provides contact information for those interested in participating.

A Great Read!

Natalie Rathvon's second edition of Effective School Interventions is a text that I first purchased as a requirement for Introduction to School Psychology course. Initially it was just another textbook, but has since become a resource I find myself regularly referring back to for intervention ideas and evidence-based technique.

Prior to releasing the second version of this book, Rathvon spent four years researching what worked in schools, as well as what was not as successful as desired. She then took her research and organized it in a way that can be put to practical use everyday in schools. This book outlines what she considered to be the top 70 interventions broken down into academic, behavioral, and classroom management strategies.

Specific to reading, pages 175-228 in the second edition outline several interventions shown to lead to improvement in the areas of decoding and word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. For each specific intervention, Rathvon provides an overview, purpose, materials needed, steps for implementation, and evaluation. As mentioned in the text, reading problems are the most common cause of school referrals for psychological services. This resource is a definite must for today's practicing school psychologist interested in helping students succeed in reading!

For more information visit Natalie Rathvon's personal website.

Intervention Central

Intervention Central is a great tool for school psychologists to use when deciding on an intervention to implement, for progress monitoring, and graphing results from ChartDog.  There are free examples of interventions and probes.  There are also ways to graph results after the intervention has been implemented.  There is also a blog on the homepage that provides different perspectives on issues and hot topics for RTI, teacher interactions, students, etc.  There are links to products, academic resources, behavioral resources, workshops, a CBM warehouse, downloads, and more information about the website.

This is a tool that I use a lot to help me with interventions and progress monitoring.  It is also helpful when trying to pull everything together.  The best part about it is that most of it is FREE.  Intervention Central is the best free resource for actually implementing RTI that I have found on the web.

The Florida Center for Reading Research

The Florida Center for Reading Research website is an extremely helpful website that provides essential resources for developing and implementing reading interventions. Due to the school psychologist's often frequent role in RTI, this website can be very beneficial to their role in working with struggling readers. This resource was introduced to me by my practicum supervisor who referred to it routinely while she worked in school districts in both South Carolina and Indiana.

As the website reads, the Florida Center for Reading Research was established in January 2002 and is jointly administered at Florida State University by the Learning Systems Institute and the College of Arts and Sciences. Listed as a component of the center's mission is to "conduct basic research on reading, reading growth, reading assessment, and reading instruction that will contribute to the scientific knowledge of reading and benefit students in Florida and throughout the nation."

The site allows the school psychologist to easily search for evidence-based reading resources based upon grade level. While some of these ideas are designed for teachers working with students in centers, they can easily be modified for a school psychologist to use either one-on-one with a struggling student or in a small group of readers. A search can be made across all five core areas of reading (i.e., phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension). Most of these resources can be searched and viewed free of charge. I currently am working on a reading intervention at my practicum placement and have found this site to be helpful in planning!

Reading Rockets!

Another very helpful website is Reading Rockets  which gives resources for individuals trying to teach children to read and help those who are struggling with reading.  It is broken down into tabs for parents, teachers, principals, librarians, and other professionals.  There is a link under “other professionals” for school psychologists which provides many resources.

Included in this section there is a free 90 page toolkit developed by Reading Rockets and NASP that contains many resources.  There are also video modules available that are paired with elements from the toolkit.  There are also related articles and new information on the right side of the page that will allow school psychologists to look into a more specific subject and stay updated on current issues.