Instruction: When to Pull
When I was in school, we learned a lot about what to do with students during direct instruction: focus on the ECC, promote integration of ECC into school curriculum, review of previous session, getting attention with 30 seconds, and so on. We were also given great researched and trialed tools to figure out how much time a student needed and how often. Then I entered the itinerant world and encountered a flaw: all that clean, smooth work just isn’t functional most of the time.
Sometimes we’re lucky and a school has a designated RTI block, perfect for doing one-on-one work with students. But then we encounter a different problem — what if the student has other services that need that time? And, more pressing, what if you have to travel between schools and the designated time doesn’t fit with demands at other schools? Who do you prioritize when five different places want you on Tuesdays at 9?
In a previous posting, the default pull time was electives (or specials or whatever preferred term an area has). PE, art, music, media are all undeniably important, especially from a social skills development angle, but they weren’t seen as being as vital as keeping up with that core curriculum. Now I work in a place that has the opposite policy - academics pretty much any time, never ever ever from electives. In the past three years I have seen several students who are pulled for services through the day to the extent that they primarily participate in the general education environment through electives, lunch, and recess.
Social skills are of high concern as it is key to life satisfaction and the building of a better life after graduation, when they no longer exist inside a subsidized bubble. Choices by other service providers are not under our control, but this is an opportunity for our skill set of being specified as teachers can come into play. Some questions to consider:
How much of a student’s day is spent inside the core education environment?
Are there ECC need areas that are already naturally occurring in their core environment? This can especially be applied to those who are in specialized programs throughout the day.
Are ECC need areas and drafted goals things that can ONLY be supported through direct instruction or can there be relatively equal success through strategies integrated throughout the student’s school day?
How many ECC need areas are also being addressed by other related service providers and can be enriched by TVI consultative support?
Can the student benefit from push-in services as a means of direct support and monitoring as opposed to traditional pull-out lessons?
There are more to consider, these are just some of the most central that play into my own planning process. What it all comes down to is a consideration of ego and comfort versus what truly serves our students. In many situations, we may be the best possible person to pull them aside and work on skills in a systematic, controlled environment. But we must never rest in that importance or on the comfort of existing practices. If we choose to stick with what exists instead of what truly works, we are endlessly hammering a square peg into a round hole. That’s a futile exercise that should be reserved by outside forces putting us into illogical situations.