May 2023
ORTIi News & Updates
This year's Annual Conference with our partners NWPBIS was terrific! It was so great to see all of you in person over 3 beautiful, sunny days in Portland.

The recordings are now available to those of you who registered for either for in-person or virtual attendance. You can access them in Whova. Go to the agenda, click on a session with the "recording" icon, and you will be able to instantly view!
We loved meeting folks at our booth. Many won some amazing prizes, including autographed books by Anita Archer and Julie Esparza Brown.
Fire Alarm Selfies!
We were glad Portland's April showers had paused for the day.
ORTIi Districts visited with Dr. Archer and each other to celebrate their hard work over the past 6 years in the project.
Save the Date!
Oregon Response to Instruction and intervention's

Annual Conference

April 4th and 5th, 2024

The Graduate Hotel and Conference Center
Eugene, Oregon
Look for registration information coming in the fall.
Wondering how to improve your students' writing?
(Audience: ALL)

This webinar on May 20th includes an overview of The Writing Rope model for writing instruction (Sedita, 2019). An explanation with references to research findings will be provided for the five strands: 1) Critical Thinking (generating ideas and information, stages of the writing process), 2) Syntax (syntactic awareness, sentence elaboration, punctuation), 3) Text Structure (narrative, informational, opinion; paragraph structure; patterns of organization, 4) Writing Craft (awareness of task, audience, purpose; word choice; literary devices), 5) Transcription (spelling and handwriting fluency). Writing instruction across grades 3-12 will be addressed. The 2 hour session costs $15 and will be recorded.

Amplify's Science of Reading: The Podcast
When not to differentiate: A guide to small-group instruction
(Audience: Elementary Teachers and Leaders)

This is a terrific episode! For districts who have worked with ORTIi, we suggest thinking about how this podcast conversation relates to intensifying an area of your whole group reading instruction (think about your team's focus skill from the Core Review Meeting) and how you could also best leverage small group instruction during core. The resources linked on the episode are also great to review. This is an episode we could listen to multiple times - especially because it's only 35 minutes!
Which Reading Model Would Best Guide Our School Improvement Efforts?
The Simple View? Scarborough's Reading Rope? The Active View of Reading? Something else?
(Audience: ALL)

There are so many take aways in Tim Shanahan's blog post from April 29th! He discusses the many models for reading, how they help us understand how reading works, and the strengths and weaknesses of each. This post would make a great close read and discussion for any professional development with your staff about reading.

The ideas in this quote should be very familiar some of you. We ask our districts to create Standards of Practice around time, materials and instruction in the literacy block. Why?
"When it comes to what we can do directly with children to improve reading achievement there are three things that make a difference: the amount of instruction that we provide, the content or curriculum of that instruction, and the quality of the delivery of that content. Those variables are especially productive because they represent variables that if altered will change the students’ experience."
Working on School Improvement?
Here are 2 great resources for implementation team members!
(Audience: School and Building Leaders)

The first resource is a webinar called 3 Overlooked Strategies for Successful School Initiatives with James Marshall. It was very engaging and gave us a lot to think about as we support the districts we work with. If you are a school leader, this webinar is for you!


A recent podcast episode of Leaders Coaching Leaders with Peter Dewitt, called Adaptive Challenges, Collective-Efficacy, Confirmation Bias and More is one you will want to listen to more than once. It has so many great things to think about. For ORTIi district leaders, this is an episode that really relates to data-based decision making such as core review and intervention review meetings.

ORTIi Resources
For Your Professional Learning Needs
MTSS Components
Does your PD plan for the year include staff training on the components of MTSS? We've got you covered! We now have facilitation guides for ALL modules!

Still need to catch up on a session or two?
Check out the December Reading Symposium
video resource page HERE.
Science of Reading
Professional Learning

Have you been asked to present some introductory information to your staff about the Science of Reading and don't know where to start? We created some slide decks you can use to start to build understanding about what science tells us about how we learn to read and how that science informs what and how we should teach reading and writing. These are not videos, so you will need to lead the sessions yourself and can customize them for your setting, but everything you need to get started is here. The topics include:
  • What is the Science of Reading Anyway?
  • Word Recognition
  • Language Comprehension
  • Explicit and Systematic Instruction
  • Reading Assessment