SOAR^® Soft Skills for RTI

Many schools are using SOAR^® Soft Skills for RTI! The following is an e-mail we received from a frustrated educator:

“I work in a middle school and see the severe lack of study and organizational skills of the students entering this academic arena. The wheels seem to fall off these students! Most have never been taught organizational skills but are expected, by middle school, to be independent and organized.

“One of my students has severe dyslexia and he is actually better off in school than the unorganized child. By law, the school is providing him with many accommodations and resource help to assist. Those children that lack organizational skills simply fall through the cracks and receive no help or sympathy!”

– Nancy Drake, Charleston, SC

Every week, we receive e-mails or phone calls from teachers like Nancy who are exasperated over the challenges their students have in school because they lack organization and study skills.

In Prince George County, VA, the team of school psychologists discovered that over 50% of their caseload referrals were due to a lack of study skills! As a result, they formed a Study Skills Committee specifically to address these problems.

Response to Intervention is now allowing schools to provide resources to these struggling students before it is too late. Study skills, or “strategic learning skills,” provide students with the skills to easily manage papers, keep track of homework, manage their time, and learn more efficiently. Every student can benefit from these skills, but struggling students have the most to gain!

Soft Skills bridge an essential gap between “mainstream” and special education! RTI allows that bridge to happen.

How It Works

Tier I: Teachers can easily embed SOAR^®’s study skills across the curriculum for the whole class. Our triangulated assessments allow teachers to identify students who need additional assistance implementing the strategies. Those students will move up to Tier II.

Tier II: In Tier II, students meet in small groups to target specific skills or strategies with which they need help. Tier I assessments will allow teachers to identify targeted small groups, based on specific skill difficulty. This small group instruction can pull additional instructional resources from the Multi-Media Teacher’s Guide or simply focus on helping students apply the strategies more effectively to their current school assignments. Assessments will monitor content knowledge and implementation.

Tier III: Students who escalate to this level are usually doing so for learning challenges outside of the spectrum of study or organizational skills. However, these skills are essential for most struggling students and continue to play a role in the individualized learning plans created in Tier III.