When I Revamped My RTI With Kahoot….

In all my years at my school site, which is a whopping two years, we have always done Response To Intervention one way. Two weeks after the set benchmark date, we have RTI week at our school, where we take twenty minutes at the end of the day for three days; Wednesday and Thursday to reteach information and Friday to retest. While this system worked in some ways, we as a school site recognized that this was not in the best interest of the students:

• Students could only be placed in one subject to retest, which meant that they needed to arrange on their own time to be retaught the information for their other classes.
• Since we don’t have a large staff, many of us teach multiple classes so that means that students may get RTI for our class, but have another teacher reteaching. This unfortunately was difficult for the students since they sometimes had to adjust to a different style or different presentation of information for only two days.
• Most of all, student scores were not improving.

So these last few weeks, we have been brainstorming ways to improve our RTI program to best help our students and we agreed to try having RTI time within the classroom. As a social science department, we discussed and decided to spend Thursday reviewing the exam with the entire class and then retesting for qualified students on Friday.

Now its Thursday night and I can’t help but wonder if what I did was a complete failure or success. I’ve been blessed with a very patient and understanding first period who understood that we were going to be trying something new. Within the first few minutes, both the students and I agreed that my plan was not working; I passed back their summary sheets of their scores and then proceeded to review the PMA. I tried whole class instruction then I tried group discussion with each question and both failed; most students started to zone out, lose interests, or completely disengaged..

Then one student shouted out, “Why don’t we use Kahoot?” Kahoot has been a new app that I discovered at the recent CVCUE conference and it “gamifies” classroom response system. My students have fallen in love with it and naturally they all agreed that we should review the test using Kahoot. I hesitated and of course they began to persuade me: “But Miss Morgan, it would make sure we are all engaged and paying attention!” “I would definitely pay more attention!” “Its a good way to review and then we would be able to teach each other!” Still, I hesitated because most students tend to focus on the competition rather than learning and reviewing the information. But they did bring up valid points so I agreed to try it.

To see whether or not Kahoot would work as my version of RTI, I decided to try it in all my classes to review the PMA. Because I had enough time, students were able to play one around competitively and then another round focusing more on the information. My first period students were correct; they were engaged, focused, and teaching each other while also having fun.

The truth, however, will come tomorrow when they retake the test. I would lie if I said I wasn’t nervous. Even though my blog is dedicated to celebrating failure, I’m still not a fan of failing. But we will never know if something doesn’t work if we never try...