Priming the Pump: Implementing Response to Intervention in Preschool

Abstract This instrumental case study used qualitative methods and grounded theory to examine the implementation of Response to Intervention (RtI) in a rural preschool program. Ten of the preschool staff and eight parents were involved. Other data sources included continuous field notes, memos maintained by the researcher, classroom observations, and documents, such as lesson plans, anecdotal records, and RtI referral forms. RtI resulted in fewer referrals to special education; the long-term ramifications are not yet known, but lessons learned from the implementation process are numerous. The path to school reform is littered with grand plans and silver bullet solutions. Tyack and Cuban (1995), in their summary of school reform efforts in the 20th Century, summed up the struggle in the title of their book on the topic: Tinkering Toward Utopia. A central theme of their book is that schools will not be changed, especially in the area that matters most - instructional practice, unless it is "teacher-centered reform" that "works from the classroom outward" (p. 139). Not only is it clear that teachers and other educational practitioners can make significant contributions toward shaping school improvement, but it is equally clear that, through resistance to innovations into which they have not been asked to buy, they also may subvert top-down efforts to implement best practices m their schools (Schmertzing, 2007). Although the implementation of RtI in this preschool setting was not required by school level administrators, it was, however, a required change based upon the Georgia Department of Education's eligibility guidelines for special education services. Those guidelines mandated that, without evidence of interventions and data showing the student's responses to those interventions, placement in special education no longer could occur except in cases where significant delays were obviously present (Georgia Department of Education [GADOE], 2011). Schmertzing (2007), in his essay on the need for practitioner research, argued that school improvement requires both highly funded expert research whose purpose it is to search for best practices and, equally important, practitioner research whose purpose it is to track and evaluate the implementation of those practices in their local contexts. He concluded, "I believe that both strands of research must be supported and maintained" (p. 33) and that training and supporting practitioners' efforts to learn to implement research will increase their professionalism and their job satisfaction. He further pointed out that, when practitioners conduct and disseminate local (action) research, they "will make their voices heard in the allimportant and ongoing debates about where American schools should and will go in the twenty-first century" (p. 22). We believe that it is particularly important that the voices of rural practitioner-researchers be heard because, as Maher, Frestedt, and Grace (2008) pointed out in their call for more research in rural settings, rural areas contain one-fifth of the nation's population, yet are "often neglected in research studies and public consciousness" (p. 2). There are differences between rural communities and their schools and their urban and suburban counterparts in terms of environmental characteristics (Campbell & Gordon, 2003) and availability of financial and educational resources (Clopton & Knesting, 2006) that makes the process of implementing a school-based intervention related to special education services different in a rural school than it would be in an urban school. This article is based on an ethnographic study conducted in a rural school that investigates the impact of an intervention in that school and the rural community it serves. We have two purposes in writing this article. The first is to report the results of an inquiry in a rural preschool of the implementation of a relatively new practice for educating young children and summarize the lessons learned for practice. …