Sometime within the next five years, I will have one of these "real jobs" I've heard so much about. I hope that my real job involves working in the public schools, preferably elementary schools, as a School Psychologist. At this point, you might be on the verge of asking something about school counselors or telling a nice story about your own school counselor and how she helped you and made you feel all warm and fuzzy. That's nice. School counselors are great people. They're not school psychologists.
So what are school psychologists? If you've worked in schools before or you were just a super perceptive kiddo when you were in school, you may think that these were the "testing people." School psychologists have historically been known as the "gatekeepers" to Special Education placement. Teacher has tried and tried and can't get through to a student, teacher refers student to school psych, school psych tests kid and kid gets placed in special education program. Voila.
Except (thankfully)... not so much anymore.
Because now (again, thankfully), school psychologists are putting their entire degree and educational background to work. This is good news for me, because I'll have 11 years of college under my belt by the time I show up for my first day of work, so I'm happy that I'll get to use more than the few semesters of testing courses on the job.
If you're lucky enough to work or have a child in a school that uses Response to Intervention (RTI) (or, if you're talking about Wake County schools, we have to call it "Intervention Alignment" because... why keep it simple?), you have some idea of where I'm going. RTI is a paradigm shift not just for school psychs but for administration, teachers, and parents as well. The idea is that we provide quality, evidence-based instructional practices to all students, combine this instruction with regular progress-monitoring, and determine which students might need additional supports (who is not responding to the general instruction?). You can browse through this RTI model from Lehigh University to see what happens next:
Looks good, right? And it is. We're taking a proactive, instead of a reactive, approach to identifying kids who are not responding to instructional practices. We're not waiting for kids to fail to the point that they have a wide ability/achievement gap before we consider giving them interventions. We're catching them early and jumping in.
Seems like a lot more work for teachers, right? They can't just refer thier kids and hope the kids are placed in special education (which rarely means a complete pull-out from the regular classroom anymore, but that's another post). And it is more work. It really is. It can be a hard sell to teachers, but it can also bring about huge changes in the school and in student achievement when teachers are on board.
So what's the school psychologist doing if she's not in her office testing kids all day anymore? She's out supporting teachers. She's implementing universal screeing tools like AIMSweb, coordinating these school-wide screenings three times each year and reviewing the data to see which students need additional instructional support. She's researching evidence-based instructional practices to help these kids and sharing them with teachers. She's observing kids in classrooms and giving teachers feedback. She is doing some testing, because there are kids who move up the tiers of RTI are still not responding to the extent we hope they will, so they might really need the intensive interventions that special education placement can provide. But the school psychologist is out in the trenches. That's where I hope to be.
So what are school psychologists? If you've worked in schools before or you were just a super perceptive kiddo when you were in school, you may think that these were the "testing people." School psychologists have historically been known as the "gatekeepers" to Special Education placement. Teacher has tried and tried and can't get through to a student, teacher refers student to school psych, school psych tests kid and kid gets placed in special education program. Voila.
Except (thankfully)... not so much anymore.
Because now (again, thankfully), school psychologists are putting their entire degree and educational background to work. This is good news for me, because I'll have 11 years of college under my belt by the time I show up for my first day of work, so I'm happy that I'll get to use more than the few semesters of testing courses on the job.
If you're lucky enough to work or have a child in a school that uses Response to Intervention (RTI) (or, if you're talking about Wake County schools, we have to call it "Intervention Alignment" because... why keep it simple?), you have some idea of where I'm going. RTI is a paradigm shift not just for school psychs but for administration, teachers, and parents as well. The idea is that we provide quality, evidence-based instructional practices to all students, combine this instruction with regular progress-monitoring, and determine which students might need additional supports (who is not responding to the general instruction?). You can browse through this RTI model from Lehigh University to see what happens next:
Looks good, right? And it is. We're taking a proactive, instead of a reactive, approach to identifying kids who are not responding to instructional practices. We're not waiting for kids to fail to the point that they have a wide ability/achievement gap before we consider giving them interventions. We're catching them early and jumping in.Seems like a lot more work for teachers, right? They can't just refer thier kids and hope the kids are placed in special education (which rarely means a complete pull-out from the regular classroom anymore, but that's another post). And it is more work. It really is. It can be a hard sell to teachers, but it can also bring about huge changes in the school and in student achievement when teachers are on board.
So what's the school psychologist doing if she's not in her office testing kids all day anymore? She's out supporting teachers. She's implementing universal screeing tools like AIMSweb, coordinating these school-wide screenings three times each year and reviewing the data to see which students need additional instructional support. She's researching evidence-based instructional practices to help these kids and sharing them with teachers. She's observing kids in classrooms and giving teachers feedback. She is doing some testing, because there are kids who move up the tiers of RTI are still not responding to the extent we hope they will, so they might really need the intensive interventions that special education placement can provide. But the school psychologist is out in the trenches. That's where I hope to be.
Comments
What kinds of assistance are there for students sitting in Level 2 after not qualifying for Level 3? I'm curious as I know RTI was adapted in my district the year following my last. In my experience, those kids were referred to as the ones "left behind" by NCLB.
I'm glad your ultimate desire is to be in the trenches. That's why I never chose to pursue anything higher (principal or professor). I loved being there coaxing, encouraging, and dragging those kids to a solid education.
-Abby
The pyramid looks a little different for each district, and sometimes each school (gotta keep it as confusing as possible in education). But here's what I've seen so far:
- Technically, special ed eligibility should be outside the "levels" of RTI - there should be kids getting intensive Tier 3 services and given the chance to respond to those before they are bumped up to testing for special ed. At the point of testing, they do still have to have the traditional achievement/ability gap to be placed.
- As far as I know so far, you're right about the "left behind" kids who really are doing their best but who aren't (and sometimes honestly can't be) on grade level. Ideally, RTI can serve these kids better than the traditional model because they can get good supports without having to formally qualify for special ed placement. However, when it comes to NCLB, they still probably won't be on grade level and thus aren't meeting that (impossible) standard to have ALL kids on grade level by 2013.
- At the school I'm doing a prac at this semester, they're really on board with RTI. It usually takes 3-5 years to get it off the ground and I think it's at the 4-year mark in this school. What it looks like there is that all kids are given the universal screen (AIMSweb) for reading (fluency and comp) 3x/year. Based on the screen, some kids are below or significantly below benchmark. These kids then are seen as "level 2" and given evidence-based supports, which at this school means at least 30 min. of small-group training in fluency and comp each week with others at their level from their grade (maybe more, I'm not sure what else they're doing at L2 right now). Then the winter benchmark period comes and we hope that they improve. If they do not, and they're still below or significantly below where they should be at the winter benchmark, they're then in tier 3 (in Wake there are 4 tiers), so they're progress-monitored every other week and given one-on-one interventions. I'm not sure exactly what their tier 3 interventions are yet.
- Then presumably there will be kids who still don't make it, who will be assessed for a specific learning disability and even if they don't qualify will then continue to be monitored at the intensive tier three level and different interventions will be tried.
- The process takes a while, so teachers and other team members can also move kids up the tiers if they're especially worried that there's no progress between benchmark universal screening times.
That's what I know so far! I'm sure I'll write more as I learn. RTI seems pretty foreign to all my KS friends but it seems to be catching on a lot in NC.
I'm a school psychologist, and I'd like to encourage more young people to consider working as school psychologists at the high school level. The drop-out rate for students who receive special education services continues to be well over the rate of non-disabled students, not only in N.C. but across the nation.
The highest rate dropout rate, in most places, is among students with serious emotional disabilities. Many of these young people are found in our jails and prisons.
There are very few school psychologists at the high school level. The most extensive intervention is special education, but the response to this intervention at the high school level is less than par.