4 Components for Effective Reading Intervention Success
”So, by this time all of your universal screening assessments should be complete. Then ask yourself, “what’s next after giving the assessments?” Well, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and dive into the data.”
RTI, MTSS, IRIP…..do these acronyms make your head spin. If so, I don’t blame you. In the era of tiered interventions, teachers must familiarize themselves with this language. Response to Intervention or Multi Tiered Systems of Support are programs that were implemented in order to decrease the amount of special education referrals. Response to Intervention (RTI) is identified as an inverted triangle, http://www.rtinetwork.org/images/content/articles/include_essential_components/sugai_pyramid.jpg, which consists of three or four tiers of support. Tier 1 is whole group instruction, tier 2 is small group instruction with the assistance of a reading specialist and tier 3 is one-on-one support with a specialist and in some cases a fourth tier is added which is a special education referral. RTI was primarily used to help students with reading and math deficits, however, MTSS encompasses a behavior component as well. Teachers, if all of this is giving you information overload, don’t worry I am going to give you 4 Components for Effective Reading Intervention Success.
Data Dive After Assessments
So by this time all of your universal screening assessments should be complete. Then ask yourself, “what’s next after giving the assessments?” Well, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and dive into the data. If your school does not host a data day then you can take matters into your own hands and analyze your own literacy data. Grab some highlighters and let’s get to work. Take a closer look at the reading scores and highlight target areas of concern and begin to formulate your small groups. I suggest using red, yellow and green highlighters. The red highlighter will be used to highlight the deficit areas, yellow for identifying some risk and green for on target skills.
Skills Based Groups over Leveled Groups
Once you have highlighted to your heart’s content, begin to look at the trends in the data to see similar deficit areas and how you can group your students. Going forward, we want to group students in skills based groups instead of leveled groups. Skills based groups allow you to focus on a specific deficit area and focus only on that skill in order to get the fastest results. For example, if you have five students who scored low in consonant digraphs, group them together and focus on that skill during your small group instruction time. Once the students have been in their groups for the allotted amount of time be sure to monitor their progress to help you make better instructional decisions.
Progress Monitor
Progress monitoring is the process in which you monitor students’ progress over a given amount of time. Once your students have been in their small groups, be sure to monitor their progress often. Depending on your school’s intervention framework, most schools usually monitor progress every 2-4 or 6-8 weeks. Do NOT skip this step because this will help to inform your data and to help you determine if the interventions are working, if you need to change your student groups or if you need to change the groups focus of instruction.
PLAN
If you have heard the old saying, “if you don’t plan, you plan to fail.” This saying holds true in teaching especially when planning for small group instruction. The MOST important thing that helped when I first started my intervention small group instruction was to PLAN. I used an intervention log in order to keep track of my students’ progress. In addition, I planned activities for the ENTIRE week. This will help you cut down on making copies at the last minute, trying to find last minute decodable texts and finding activities for the other students to complete while you are working with small groups. Small group instruction is not a process in which you throw a lesson together at the last minute, if you do that, it will cause much unwanted stress. If you follow these 4 tips hopefully this will help your small group interventions get off to the right start.
I hope these 4 Components for Effective Reading Intervention Success helped. If you would like more help with literacy interventions for the classroom follow me at https://www.instagram.com/mooreliteracyleaps/.
Good Luck,
Shannon
