Differences in Teachers' Responsiveness to Instruction
Teachers differ as individuals despite the quality of their professional preparation. We may hold them accountable for achieving higher standards when they are learning their professional skills, but like their students, they cannot be made identical. The will respond differently to different students and to the same student under different circumstances. Therefore, RTI's measurement aspirations demand either strong constraints on how teaching interventions occur or strong claims that teacher variations do not matter.
The few RTI studies that exist report little about variations in teachers' thoughts and behaviors during administration of planned interventions. That is, although interventions are described in terms of their aims, methods, general procedures, and (less often) how those responsible for administering interventions were prepared, this is relatively abstract information, rather like providing a blueprint of a house we want to build instead of the house itself. While certainly the blueprint guides construction, the actual house can and will depart in numerous consequential ways. Even teachers of small intervention groups make decisions to continue or adjust instruction based on evaluation of quality (e.g., automaticity or fluency) as well as accuracy of students' responses. Such decisions and the choices that follow cannot be fully programmed in advance without ignoring potentially meaningful individual differences among students.
In the published research, how long, and to what performance criteria, were teachers, tutors, or other interveners prepared by researchers? Vaughn, for example, notes 20 hours of preparation for four tutors and weekly meetings thereafter (Vaughn et al., 2003). Torgesen cites 40 hours of baseline preparation for teachers in classrooms from which risk students were to be selected for intensive interventions (Torgesen, 2003). We trust that teachers in these cases were well prepared, but how and at what cost researchers accommodated individual differences among teachers is not inconsequential. What constraints were placed on how teachers were permitted to interact with students, to accommodate unusual or unexpected responses, to manage attention and behavior? In the course of baseline instruction or intervention, did students require any differential treatment by teachers so they could meet implementation fidelity and intervention coverage requirements?
Research on practice is not the same as practice. Research, by its nature, seeks to control unwanted sources of variance. In applied settings, these intrusions on experimental blueprints often cannot be controlled so attempts are made to decrease - or to ignore - their impact. For example, we have strong evidence that strategy training is effective for students with learning disabilities. However, over the several decades of research on strategy training, variations in responses by students during training, or variations in correlated responses by teachers to students, were rarely reported, only that trainers had this or that status and students performed to this or that criterion. Did trainers behave exactly the same during each and every episode of training? Were students' responses and ultimate outcomes precisely the same, or were they simply tolerably close to a priori criteria? In fact, the same learning characteristics that identify students as learning disabled are precisely those characteristics to which a good teacher must make measured responses if mastery of a strategy is the goal.
This is not a denial of the empirically demonstrated value of strategy training or RTI applications. On the contrary, the point is that teachers in strategy studies almost surely varied in many contingent ways in response to their students, including allocation of additional instructional time, in order to reach desired levels of response. In fact, it would be unnatural - and unbelieveable - if they didn't. Teachers in RTI studies, although probably inclined to behave in a similar, if more rigidly time constrained, manner. In both cases, researchers tend not to report teacher differences because, for researchers' different purposes, teachers behaved in ways that were considered tolerably different.
Teachers, when unconstrained, are and should be variable in their responsiveness to students' variable responsiveness (Reynolds, 1988). All standard-protocol approaches to RTI, like any measurement process, will inevitably tolerate some variations even when teachers' behaviors are highly constrained and, consequently, will produce variable learner outcomes when time is fixed. When we consider the variation that schools introduce on top of teachers' natural variability (King & Torgesen, 2000), it is unlikely that RTI approaches can be scaled to a national level as implemented in existing research (e.g., see Schneider & Ingram, 1990; Weatherly & Lipsky, 1977). Problem-solving approaches (Fuchs, Mock, Morgan, & Young, 2003), while criticized for their departure from the kind of experimental control that can isolate unwanted sources of variance, occur not only as part of formal systems but also as part of each and every normal teaching act, much as in dynamic assessment (Gerber, 2002).
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