For example, we might recommend that a third-grade teacher team take lead responsibility for planning Tier 2 interventions that reteach third-grade essential standards. We are not suggesting that third-grade teachers—and these teachers alone—are responsible for this outcome. Could they utilize instructional aides, special education staff, peer tutors, and parent volunteers to help provide interventions for these students who need additional time and support in mastering third-grade essential curriculum? Of course. But to ensure something happens, the buck must stop with specific people. It makes sense that the third-grade team is the best group on campus to know the specific learning needs of each third-grade student and would thus be the logical choice for taking lead responsibility to plan these interventions.
What Do the Boxes Represent?
Every school has interventions, but very few have systematic interventions. A school has a systematic intervention process when it can promise every parent that it does not matter which teacher his or her child is assigned to, as every student receives the additional time and support needed to learn at high levels (Buffum et al., 2012).
Failure to create a timely, systematic process to identify students in need of additional help makes the school’s interventions an education lottery that leaves the question of intervention up to each teacher to resolve. The first step of any intervention is identifying students who need help. How can a school help students if it is ignorant of students’ struggles?
The boxes down the left side of the pyramid represent the processes a school uses to identify students for Tier 2 and Tier 3 assistance. See figure 1.9.
The first step of any intervention is identifying students who need help.
FIGURE 1.9: Processes a school uses to identify students for Tier 2 and Tier 3 assistance.
A systematic identification process not only identifies which students need interventions but also utilizes the right kinds of information to best target each student’s needs at each tier. Throughout this book, we clearly define the roles and uses of universal screeners, formative assessments, and diagnostic tools in the RTI process.
What Is the Role of Special Education?
If there were no labels in education—regular education, special education, Title I, English learner (EL), gifted, accelerated—how would a school target students for interventions? Wouldn’t it be based on students who have the same needs? For example:
► Students struggling with consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) blends
► Students having difficulty multiplying exponents
► Students lacking organizational skills to keep track of assignments
So, wouldn’t it make sense to group students by need and not by a label for school funding purposes?
And how would a school determine which staff members should lead each of these interventions? Wouldn’t it be based on who has training and expertise in teaching CVC blends, algebra, or organizational skills? Although this approach is clearly logical, it is often not the norm, as many schools instead group students by labels tied to funding sources. Such decisions are justified with the claim, “But the law does not allow us the flexibility to group students by need.”
As referenced earlier, the federal reauthorization of IDEIA in 2004 promotes early intervention services, which allows districts to use a percentage of special education resources to support students not currently in special education. We are not suggesting that there are no limitations on how to use the skills of special education staff, but whenever possible, school resources should be allocated based on a student’s need, not his or her label.
As discussed earlier, RTI is based on a multitiered system of interventions delivered by both general and special education teachers and staff. However, what exactly is an intervention?
What Is an Intervention?
An intervention is anything a school does above and beyond what all students receive to help certain students succeed academically. If all students receive a particular instructional practice or service, it is part of the school’s core instructional program. But if the school provides a specific practice, program, or service to some students, it is an intervention. Intervention and remediation are not merely provided for academic skills. Behavior, attendance, and health services can be interventions as well as enrichment for students who have already mastered essential grade-level standards.
An intervention is anything a school does above and beyond what all students receive to help certain students succeed academically.
Beyond this broad definition of the term intervention, we make some further distinctions. When interventions occur during Tier 1 core instruction, we call them preventions. This captures the thinking in the phrase, “The best intervention is prevention.” We don’t want to wait until the summative test to find out which students need more help. Instead, we are constantly assessing which students could benefit from a quick clarification or reteaching.
As noted, when, despite the preventions received during Tier 1 core instruction, some students do not demonstrate proficiency on essential standards our summative assessments measure, we continue to provide them with additional help. This is Tier 2 intervention—a little more help with what we just finished studying. The teacher must now move on to the next unit, but because these are essential standards, students continue to receive Tier 2 interventions until they achieve mastery.
When the causes of students’ struggles are rooted in a lack of skills and knowledge from previous years of study, we call efforts to fill in this gap Tier 3 remediation. These are not skills and knowledge from the last lesson the teacher taught; they are from previous years—many times, from several years before. We capture this thinking in figure 1.10.
FIGURE 1.10: Skills and knowledge from previous years of study.
Just as there are interventions for students who are struggling, there is a need for extensions for students who need more challenge.
Extension is when students are stretched beyond essential gradelevel curriculum or levels of proficiency.
What Is Extension?
Extension is when students are stretched beyond essential grade-level curriculum or levels of proficiency. We can achieve this outcome in many different ways, including the following.
► Ask students to demonstrate mastery of essential standards at a level beyond what is deemed grade-level proficient. For example, many schools applying a four-point rubric to a grade-level writing prompt deem a score of 3 as grade-level proficient. Stretching students beyond to a score of 4 would be an example of extended learning.
► Give students access to more of the required grade-level curriculum deemed important but not essential.
► Teach students above-grade-level curriculum, such as advanced placement (AP) classes.
Interventions
