Susan Edwards, middle school educator, talks about Leaps assessment tools and Response to Intervention (RTI). Ms. Edwards shares how Leaps helps teachers in her middle school collect data for the district to help monitor and manage reporting on student behavior. Ms. Edwards is also happy with how engaged the students are when with working with the self assessment tool, engaging them to think about their behavior.
This school uses Leaps for
Response to Intervention (RTI)
In-School Suspension
Classroom Behavior Support
Self-Assessments
Data CollectionÂ
Reporting
RubricsÂ
Student Engagement
“One thing that’s been really amazing to me is that when we have the students do a self-assessment, they get engaged. They want to know about themselves. They get excited about taking the test and thinking about the all the questions it asks them. Leaps has been amazing. I think the kids have enjoyed it and it has been a real tool for us with Response to Intervention and the data that we need to collect.”
II. Secondary Prevention: Specialized Small Group Leaps has a multi-modal, multi-tiered assessing process. This process allows for the individual assessment of a student. Leaps takes this assessment and creates an automated profile of the student that quantifies the students’ current psychosocial functioning level and then correlates the risk of behaviors to this functioning level. Leaps then breaks this functioning level into 10 categories and quantifies the student’s strengths and deficits within each category and provides the data necessary to identify the students whose categorical functioning levels indicate placement in specific small groups. Finally, the Leaps profile provides a formulary based prescription of what to teach for intervention, prevention, and social support purposes.
For small groups, Leaps enables educators to choose completed, individual profiles of the specific students he or she wants in a small group from the database. Leaps then takes each individual student’s profile and aggregates them into a profile for the small group. Leaps takes this data and creates a report on the group that outlines the functioning level of the group, the categorical strengths and deficits of the group, and then provides a prescription for intervention, prevention, and social support lessons specific to the needs of the students within that group. Leaps then fulfills all areas of need with content in the form of lesson plans that are specifically designed for the areas of need of the small group.
Finally, Leaps provides a comparison tool that gives the educator the ability to compare the groups’ functioning levels, within the categories measured, at the pre-participation level to the groups’ post-participation level of functioning. Leaps actually quantifies the groups levels of functioning with each of the 10 measured categories and automates the progress reporting for the group by comparing pre and post participation functioning levels and reporting on quantified progress and the percentage of progress this represents. Leaps gives the educator everything he or she needs to identify the students in need of a small group, identify the small groups he or she needs to create, align the students into the correct group, access the content necessary for that specific group, and then report the groups progress as well as the progress of individual group participants. Â
LEAPS AND RTI FOR BEHAVIOR: HOW IT WORKS RTI TIER 3
RTI Tier III -Â Remediation
Leaps provides a multi-modal, multiple format assessing process that creates a highly individualized behavior improvement plan. This plan denotes the level of functioning of the student and the associated risk, it then categorizes and reports skills strengths and deficits, and then it identifies the intervention, prevention, and social integration areas of need. Leaps then fills each of these areas of need with lesson plans for intervention, prevention, and remediation. This process provides the opportunity for a pre and post participation assessment which provides specific and quantifiable statements of progress or regression. Leaps assessing and student profiling:
identifies the specific level of functioning of the student and then denotes the functional and behavioral risks associated with this level of functioning
communicates the areas of strength and deficit and then provides a “lay†interpretation of the areas of need and their potential impact
provides a categorical breakdown of areas of need with specific levels of functioning within each of the existing categories. This information allows for a small group development and placement based upon a specificity of need
creates an evolving improvement plan based upon the progress or decompensation of the student and then identifies the specific areas of need to be addressed in a priority order. Specific remediation content is then provided for each area of assigned need
LEAPS AND RTI FOR BEHAVIOR:Â HOW IT WORKS RTI TIER 2
Tier II – Targeted Group Intervention
Leaps provides the assessing and reporting tools to identify the students in need of behavioral intervention training as well as the data necessary to create and assign small group placement for maximum benefit of results. Leaps accomplishes this by identifying the individual needs of students but then reporting those individual needs in a categorical fashion for small group development. This specificity gives the educator/interventionist the best opportunity to group students based upon real need and therefore the best opportunity to intervene in that need while producing measurable and demonstrable benchmarks for placement, progress, and exiting the group. Leaps produces Tier II reporting and programming results by:
identifying behaviorally at-risk students through a robust multi-modal assessing process
creating an individualized student plan that identifies the students individual level of functioning but comports those individual needs into group modality formats
identifying areas of need that are common amongst different students for the development of small groups
Providing the reportable benchmarks with a parental interpretation for an active communication plan
creating categorical benchmarks for pre and post participation measurements
categorizing areas of intervention into functional groupings which makes communication, implementation, and fidelity efficient and effective
On average, 15% of a school’s students are identified as at-risk, performing below expected levels, or needing specific supports to make adequate academic progress. Leaps resources, in the form of individual and group assessment tools, enable educators to precisely target the skill deficits that can best help the student function, cope and adapt more appropriately to his school, community, and home environments. This gives the student the best opportunity for academic success. Leaps lesson plans are designed to foster active discussion and role-play scenarios that are ideal for small group or classroom use.
Most Tier II Leaps implementations are centered around grouping students into categorical, or functional groups, based upon a commonality of assessed deficits. This specificity of grouping process allows for a true entrance criteria, progress goals, and measurable and reportable outcomes.
I. Primary Prevention: System and Classroom Leaps provides a broad array of social and emotional development content in both higher and lower maturity lesson formats. In fact, Leaps offers nearly 200 lesson plans covering the range of social development topics from basic living, to communication and decision making, to clinical skills. With thousands of pages of lesson plans, worksheets and family communication recaps – how does an educator know what to do?
Leaps has the answer – through a classroom based observational assessment process that identifies the most relevant lesson plans for a classroom based upon the observations of the teacher. This allows for a systemic focus on a core element such as Bullying or Respect but it also means that each individual classroom, though focused on the core element, is learning skills necessary for that class. There are commonalities within the core elements of social and emotional growth but the fulfillment of those developmental processes would be based upon educator input that allows for an individualization of teaching for that classroom. The Leaps “Classroom Challenges†resource accomplishes this. The system sets the focus, the teacher gives his or her input, Leaps assigns the lessons, and the students learn the social and emotional elements within a framework of their need. Learn more:Overview, PBIS Tier2, PBIS Tier3
