Scenario

Below is a hypothetical situation illustrating how the RTI process works in the schools.

Identification 

Students are administered DIBELS assessments 3 times a year.  In the Beginning of the Year (BOY), you (the teacher) see that 5 of your students are in the red, indicating they are far behind grade-level standards in Nonsense Word Fluency and Letter Sound Identification. There are also 4 students in the yellow range, indicating they are at-risk.  At this point, you would:

• Closely monitor the progress of the 4 students in the yellow range, to see if they improve by the Middle of Year (MOY) assessment
• Recommend the 5 students in the red for an intervention, targeting letter sounds and sound blending

Intervention 
At this point, the interventionist is likely to implement an intervention targeting letter sounds and sound-blending.  I like using the Word Building intervention that can be found in Rathvon, 2008 (mentioned in previous posts).  The purpose of this intervention is to build decoding skills with an activity that transforms one word into another by changing a grapheme at the beginning, middle, or end of the word. This intervention should be done 2-3 times a week for 30 minutes.

Progress Monitoring 
At the end of each intervention session, the student will be given a "post-test" of the words they have used that lesson, and can chart their own progress.  This is the form of progress-monitoring the interventionist will have available at the end of each session.  After 2 weeks (4-6 intervention sessions), the interventionist will have some data from the progress monitoring chart to see if the student is improving on their letter sound identification and sound blending abilities.  If improvement is evidenced, the intervention will continue.  If there doesn't seem to be much progress made, the interventionist will try a different intervention or approach.

Communication

...With Parents 

1.  Encourage Parental Involvement 

Parents may not always be aware of the RTI process of identification and subsequent interventions.  Research has shown that students whose parents were involved in the RTI process made significantly greater progress in their intervention goals than children whose parents didn't participate (Evangelou & Sylvia, 2003).  It is important to establish a good relationship with parents so they are more willing to participate in the process and work with their children at home on the skills they are learning in school.

It is also important to know the parents' specific concerns about their child, and address those concerns first.  This will also continue to strengthen the collaborative relationship between you and the parents, and encourage parents to continue staying involved.

2.  Explain Educational Language 

Parents may not be familiar with the educational terminology that teachers use, especially intervention terms such as "curriculum-based assessment" "progress monitoring" "benchmark" etc.  This table has some terms and definitions that may be helpful to explain to parents.

3.  Keep in Regular Contact with Parents 

This can be done in a number of ways, depending on your preferences.  Some teachers prefer to email parents on a daily or weekly basis.  Other strategies involve having a "daily diary" where you update parents on the student's daily progress.

This is also a helpful checklist teachers can use and provide for parents to keep track of parent-teacher meetings about the intervention process.

The RTI Network also provides further information on engaging parents in the RTI process.

The National Center for Learning Disabilities provides parent resources and information for parents about the RTI process as well.



...With Teachers

If students in your class see other teachers throughout the day, and they probably will, it is important to communicate the student's difficulty or progress as it applies to the class.  In a setting where the student has different teachers for different subjects (i.e. in middle/high school), it is helpful to share information about progress and interventions so all teachers are aware and can do their best to help the student succeed in their classroom.

Progress Monitoring

Progress monitoring for RTI is used to assess a student's progress in documented areas of difficulty.  It is a method by which teachers and other administrators are able to tell if students are benefitting from the instructional method, or if other methods need to be considered.

When a student is identified as at-risk after the universal screener (Acuity, DIBELS, etc.), his or her progress in the general education classroom should be closely monitored.  His or her rate of learning should be compared to peers in the class or grade.  If there is a discrepancy between what the student should know and their actual rate of learning, that is a sign for the teacher that a different instruction method may be appropriate.

Ideally, progress monitoring should take place weekly or perhaps monthly, if monitoring weekly was not feasible.  A student who is not responding adequately to classroom instruction, based on progress-monitoring data, would be placed in Tier 2 intervention with more intensive instruction that is more designed for the student's particular needs.

Benefits of Progress Monitoring (National Center on Progress Monitoring)
1)  Students learn more quickly because they are receiving appropriate instruction
2)  Teachers make more informed instructional decisions
3)  Documentation of progress monitoring is available for accountability purposes
4)  Communication between parents and teachers improves
5)  Teachers have higher expectations for their students
6)  Decrease in special education referrals

Curriculum Based Measurements (CBMs)
The same measures mentioned previously (DIBELS especially) are good assessments to use to gauge reading progress in the general education setting.  The RTI Network website states that good CBM tasks include:

• phoneme segmentation fluency (pre-reading)
• letter sound fluency (pre-reading)
• word identification fluency 
• passage reading fluency 
• maze passage fluency 
• math computation 
• math concepts and applications 
• spelling 
• correct word sequences (written expression)

All of those tasks mentioned are part of the DIBELS modules, and used by teachers to progress monitor their general education students.  It is also helpful that DIBELS can be used often, such as on a weekly or monthly basis to evaluate whether a student is learning the information.

Intervention Resources

Five Pillars of Reading Instruction 
Fluency
Phonics
Phonemic Awareness
Comprehension
Vocabulary

Reading Fluency Interventions 

Reading fluency is the ability to read text accurately, automatically, and with appropriate expression.  It is thought of as a bridge between word decoding and reading comprehension.  It is a set of skills that allows the reader to quickly decode text while being able to comprehend what was read.

The Florida Center for Reading Research has letter fluency activities to help students start mastering reading fluency skills.

Intervention Central has a number of evidence-based interventions to help improve reading fluency skills.  These can be used individually or in small-group settings in the classroom.

Reading Rockets provides some guidelines for teachers when helping students with reading fluency.  This includes helping students reread passages to gain fluency as well as comprehension.

This website for teachers provides multiple reading fluency strategies that can be used in the classroom.

Phonological Awareness Interventions 
Phonological awareness is the consciousness of the sounds in words.  It is a broad term and includes the ability to perceive syllables and rhymes, as well as individual speech sounds, or phonemes (Gunning, 2013).  It is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability (Nunes et al., 2001).

Phonemic awareness is the specific ability to focus and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words (phonemes).  Interventions that focus on phonological and phonemic awareness help students learn and blend letter sounds to make words.  These are usually used in grades K-3, and work on improving the connection between letter sounds and whole word reading.

This website has some background on phonemic awareness and related activities for parents and teachers.

This website has a series of phonological awareness activities, categorized by grade and activities (rhyming, sentence segmentation, syllable awareness, blending phonemes, and phoneme deletion).

The Florida Center for Reading Research has various teacher-guided activities that can be used in learning centers in the classroom.

Reading Rockets has a number of different phonological awareness activities that can be done in the classroom.

For other activities, or to create your own, there are Pinterest pages devoted to phonological awareness that can help engage your students more effectively.

Phonics 
Phonics is a method of teaching reading and writing by developing phonemic awareness, which is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes.   It is the connection of letters and sounds, and the goal of phonics is to enable readers to be able to decode new words by sounding them out and blending the sounds to make words.  

This website has free Tier 1 and 2 phonics interventions that are from evidence-based sources.

Reading Rockets has a chart of phonics interventions that can be purchased by the school for class/grade-wide, small group, and intensive interventions.

The Florida Center for Reading Research provides some phonics activities for beginning readers.

Comprehension 
Reading comprehension is the ability to read text, process it fully, and understand the meaning.  Reading Rockets provides some strategies for teaching text comprehension in the classroom setting.

Intervention Central includes a number of evidence-based reading comprehension strategies, including story mapping, keyword memorization, and using prior knowledge.

This website provides free reading comprehension passages and worksheets for students in upper elementary and middle school.

This chart has further reading comprehension strategies and questions to ask students while they are reading.

Vocabulary 
This is the body of words we use to express ourselves.  This website includes various strategies for teaching both easy (most used) and more difficult vocabulary words in the classroom.  This website provides some strategies for teaching common core vocabulary words.

There are number of free vocabulary interventions, as well as those that require certain technology (iPad).

There are some vocabulary strategies that include multi-media approaches to learning new vocabulary words (drawing, word splash, graffiti).

Designing Interventions

Grouping
In designing reading interventions, it is important to determine which interventions are needed and which students will be receiving interventions.  The following is the process used for grouping students:

1)  Using the results of CBMs mentioned in the previous post, the teacher (you) can get a clear idea of which students are struggling and need further assistance in one or more areas of reading.

• The CBMs have levels that identify when a student is performing at grade level, is struggling, or is far behind where he or she needs to be -- the specific cutoffs will be different based on which CBM is used in the classroom/school. 

2) If there are two or more students on a similar level that may need similar assistance, it is appropriate to place them in a small group intervention targeting their particular reading difficulties.

• If the student is exhibiting global reading deficits, it may be beneficial to place him or her in an individual intervention to address these difficulties in a more effective manner.

3) If there is a more class-wide difficulty with a particular concept, it may be beneficial to implement a whole group intervention. 

4) If ELL students are having reading difficulties, CBMs are useful to see what additional reading services the students may need.  It is beneficial to work with ELLs in a small group setting in addition to whole group instruction in order to ensure understanding.  

Designing Interventions 

Once students who are struggling have been identified, it is easier to see which reading concepts they are struggling with the most.  The next post in the blog includes links for interventions and resources based on the five areas of reading instruction.  After you chose a suitable intervention, it is important to design to see if it is effective or if another approach may be more appropriate.  

The following are steps in designing an intervention in a single-subject design (Brown-Chidsey & Steege, 2010): 

1)  Establish a baseline measure of academic performance 

• Baseline -- current state of a student's performance 
• Provides a basis for predicting likely behavior or performance if no intervention is implemented 
• This can be CBM/benchmark assessment data that has already been obtained 
• with assessment data, three separate assessments of each skill will meet the requirement for establishing a baseline (i.e. letter-naming fluency, phonemic segmentation, and nonsense word fluency) 

2)  Introduce the intervention 

• The intervention is implemented consistently and with precision (based on the instructions of the particular intervention that is chosen)
• Keep track of the student's performance on the intervention and graph the progress.

3)  Document the effects of the intervention through repeated measurement 

• Compare the student's performance on the baseline to his or her performance during the intervention 
• If the baseline was benchmark assessment, continue progress monitoring 1x per week with the same assessments to see if the student is improving over time.  It is important to graph these results to see if the intervention is working and if the student is progressing.  
• This website has graphing resources for teachers and parents to help them graph RTI data 
• For certain interventions, graphing by hand is not very difficult and you can have the student graph their own progress -- this is helpful for the student to see his or her own progress and improvement.

4)  It is important to designate a "decision point" during the intervention (usually 4-5 weeks into the intervention).  This is to see if the student is making progress and understanding the concepts better than he or she did at the start of the intervention.  If this is not the case, it may be time to see if the intervention needs to be tweaked, or if a new approach is needed to the problem.  It may be that the student is having multiple reading difficulties, or needs to go at a slower pace.  Using the intervention data (that you will have in graph form) will help you determine this.  

5)  If after the decision point, another intervention is chosen that may be more effective, start the baseline/data collection/progress monitoring process once more with the new intervention. 

Brown-Chidsey, R. & Steege, M.W. (2010).  Response to intervention: Principles and strategies for effective practice.  New York: The Guildford Practical Intervention in the Schools Series.

Identification of Students

Response to Intervention 
RTI is an organizational preventative framework to close the achievement gap and help identify students with learning difficulties or disabilities.  Teachers and schools are able to identify students at risk for poor outcomes, monitor student progress, and provide evidence-based interventions.

RTI components involve:

• universal screening 
• tiers of instruction 
• progress monitoring 
• decision-making rules 

Identification 
In the RTI model, identification of students with a learning difficulty or disability is determined following a universal screening process at the first tier.  In Indiana schools, this is usually determined through mClass and DIBELS data.  Students who are in the yellow range on DIBELS reading skills are usually monitored more closely as they may have more difficulty later on in the year.  There is much more concern about students in the red for DIBELS and they are usually placed in small-group or individual interventions to help them learn the skills they are lacking.  In this way the RTI process is meant to help students catch up with the rest of their grade and so the achievement gap is not widened any further.

(National Center on Response to Intervention, 2009)

Best Practices for Identification 

Shinn, 2002 discusses using curriculum-based assessment (CBA) strategies to see how students are able to grasp the content of the general education classroom.  He defines CBAs as any form of assessment, including homework samples, end of unit or end of year tests, performance assessments, etc. that help inform the teacher of how the class is doing as a whole.

The National Center on Response to Intervention provides a chart for evaluating the main universal screeners used by schools and their effectiveness.  The most common assessments used in Indiana schools are Acuity, which tests English/Language Arts and Mathematics.  Since these are the most common tested areas, there is a greater interest in making sure students are on track in English and Math skills.  Another common screener used for identification is the DIBELS assessment system, which is administered 3 times a year (Beginning, Middle, and End) which looks at mastery of reading skills, such as nonsense word fluency, letter naming fluency, oral reading fluency, phoneme segmentation fluency, and first sound fluency.

Reading Rockets also provides a list of target areas to use for universal screeners for reading:

• letter naming fluency 
• phoneme segmentation 
• nonsense word fluency 
• word identification 
• oral reading fluency 

These assessments are given to all students at the same time, and the scores are compared to see which students are farther behind than their classmates on certain concepts.  Students below a particular cut-off are identified as having greater issues mastering the particular skills being assessed and are then placed in a small-group (Tier 2) intervention to help improve mastery of those concepts.

Introduction and Philosophy

I believe that reading is possible for all students, but that some may struggle more than others either due to lack of proper instruction, or a congenital reading disability.  Regardless of the cause, with early intervention, I believe all children can learn effective reading strategies and be able to read as well as their peers. 

Current Response to Intervention theories use class- or grade-wide progress monitoring throughout the school year to evaluate which students are falling behind (Brown-Chidsey & Steege, 2010).  Programs like mClass are used often in Indiana to monitor student progress in reading with beginning, middle, and end of year assessments.  These assessments, depending on the grade, target letter knowledge, nonsense word fluency, beginning and ending sounds, and general word fluency skills.  The RTI process therefore works with students who struggle with the basic skills of reading.  Ideally, interventions are targeted for each student, based on his or her need as evidenced by progress monitoring scores. 

Based on need, individual interventions can be increased to small-group settings.  For example, if there are many kindergarteners having difficulty with their letter sounds, a small-group intervention may be more useful in getting the most effective results.  Such an intervention would be able to reach more students to improve reading levels (Wagner et al., 2006; Simmons et al., 2007).  The most accurate way to see what kind of reading difficulty the student has is to do a comprehensive psychoeducational assessment.  However, that is not feasible in most cases, unless the student has already been falling behind in class and interventions are not working (Savage & Carless, 2005).  

Based on this philosophy, the aim of this blog is to provide teachers with resources and evidence-based interventions for students with varying reading difficulties.  The interventions will also range from individual, small-group, and whole-class instruction.  

References 

Brown-Chidsey, R. & M.W. Steege.  (2010).  Response to intervention: Principles and strategies for effective practice (2nd ed.).  Guilford: New York.

Savage, R. & Carless, S. (2005).  Learning support assistants can deliver effective reading interventions for 'at-risk' children.   Educational Research, 47(1), 45-61.

Simmons, D.C., Kame'enui, E.J., Harn, B. ... & Kaufman, N.  (2007).  Attributes of effective and efficient kindergarten reading interventions: An examination of instructional time and design specificity.  Journal of Learning Disabilities, 40(4), 331-347.

Wagner, D., McComas, J.J., Bollman, K., & Holton, E.  (2006).  The use of functional reading analysis to identify effective reading interventions.  Assessment for Effective Reading Interventions, 32(1), 40-49.