Response to Intervention and Reading

Intervening Effectively in Literacy

Kevin Feldman had a conversation recently with a teacher who was providing
specialized reading instruction to a small group of students in her class. One of
those students wasn’t showing any improvement on the periodic progressmonitoring
assessments. The graph charting his individual progress was “flatlining,”
going nowhere, recalls Feldman, director of reading and early intervention
at the Sonoma County Office of Education.

“Upon reflection, she saw that she was doing a lot of work at the word level when
the goal was to increase overall fluency and comprehension. She wasn’t having the
kid read enough connected text every day,” Feldman said in a recent interview, “so
she re-jiggered her approach, doing half as much word-level work and adding twice
as much sentence and passage work and—boom!—the graph started going up
immediately.”

The teacher was able to make that speedy adjustment because she was in a school
that had adopted Response to Intervention (RtI), the innovative, proactive approach
to identifying students with reading problems as soon as they enter school, getting
immediate help to them in their regular classroom environment, and monitoring
them frequently to assess their progress. Classroom teachers, reading specialists,
and other educators can see what’s working and what’s not and make modifications
quickly. And because the initial stages of RtI are part of general education, the
students are not separated out into special education classes and stigmatized as
learning disabled.

Feldman, who develops and monitors programs related to literacy and prevention
of reading difficulties, says RtI is long overdue. Most of the students currently
placed in special education are classified as learning disabled, and, Feldman says,
“for 90 percent or more, the primary presenting disability has directly to do with
reading.”

Remedying the Discrepancy Model

In most schools today, students needing help are identified by assessors who use the
“discrepancy model,” which considers the difference between a child’s IQ and his
or her performance in school. Because it usually takes at least a couple of years to
quantify a sufficient discrepancy, most students are placed in special education
sometime between the middle of second grade and the middle of fourth grade.
Feldman says this “wait to fail” intervention often comes too late.

“Did the kids first start having problems then?” he asks rhetorically. No, he says,
literacy problems can be detected in kindergarten or even in pre-kindergarten.
“We’ve known for a long time that the model we have doesn’t make pragmatic
sense. You have to fail and fall two to three years behind your peers, feel stupid, and
become de-motivated around issues like reading before we can get you help in a
systematic way.”
Now, with RtI, systematic help is on the way. “We’re going to assume that
children will come into kindergarten with widely differing needs. Some kids will
have difficulty with reading and there’s no obvious reason why—they don’t have
cognitive impairment; they’re not learning English as a second language—but they
are struggling. And some of them will have needs that are so acute that if we don’t
meet them now, they will manifest themselves into what we later call learning
disabilities.”

Addressing Learning Disabilities

“Learning disability” is itself a problematic label, Feldman says, because it implies
that the child has a disability that is preventing her from reading at the level of her
peers. But the reality is usually more complex—literacy problems have multiple
sources, often including what and how a student is being taught. “There are
curricular disabilities, there are instructional disabilities, there are school
organizational disabilities,” he says. “A significant school organizational disability
would be assuming that everybody needs the same thing and then offering a onesize-
fits-all model for kids who are not successful.

“What RtI is attempting to do is provide a plan for schools to organize themselves
sensibly, a plan that starts out assuming that kids will have different needs. We’re
going to screen them in kindergarten, provide the best program we have, and screen
them again in the middle of the year. If they’re not making progress, we’re not
going to wait or refer them to special ed or spend thousands of dollars on
psychological testing. We’re going to provide practical, pragmatic help right now as
part of the general education system.”

Adapting a Three-Tier Model

Although the implementation of RtI varies from state to state and even from school
to school, a widely adapted approach to reading interventions is the three-tier model
promulgated by the Texas Education Agency and the University of Texas, where
there is an ongoing RtI research program. The model takes the goal of RtI—early
intervention to prevent young readers from falling behind their peers—and creates
three increasingly intensive levels of instruction. Throughout the tiers, instruction is
grounded in five specific reading skills: (1) Phonemic awareness, which is
recognizing the sounds of spoken language and how they work together;

(2) Phonics and word study, which is identifying the letters of the alphabet and
recognizing how the sounds of spoken language are represented in a written word;
(3) Fluency; (4) Vocabulary; and (5) Comprehension.

Looking at the Tiers

Tier 1 instruction is part of the general education curriculum and takes place in the
regular classroom. All students are tested on the components of reading—usually in
the fall, winter, and spring. Students who are not keeping up with the class receive
extra instruction in small groups that focus on particular skills—a focus that can be
modified depending on what the assessments reveal.

“The classroom teacher might do a little ‘after-lunch bunch,’ pulling aside the
lowest five kids based on their screening assessments, while the rest of the kids are
working on something else,” Feldman says. “Some kids will need pre-teaching,
some re-teaching, some additional practice.

“From an RtI point of view, providing excellent general instruction, supplemental
intervention, and assessment of all students as part of the regular program—and
doing that systematically over time—is probably a better indicator of which
students aren’t learning what they need to learn than any single test we can give.”

For some students, the extra attention in Tier 1 will be sufficient to catch them
up, and no further intervention is needed. For others, whom the assessments have
identified as at-risk readers, additional help is needed, and they move on to Tier 2.
The more focused intervention of Tier 2 is still part of general—not special—
education and is designed to augment the core reading curriculum by concentrating
on the particular components of reading in which the student is deficient.

Identifying Critical Issues

The critical issue in Tier 2, says Feldman, is “Do you have the right kids—and your
screening assessments will tell you that you do—and are you matching your
instruction to exactly what they need? You might have one kindergarten group that
needs more work on hearing initial sounds and blending them at the beginning of
words and another group that hears sounds fine but needs work on language and
vocabulary development.”

A significant number of students will require Tier 2 intervention. The instructor
may be the classroom teacher or a reading specialist, and the instruction may take
place in the classroom or elsewhere in the school. “It doesn’t matter where the
students are served; what matters is how they are served,” Feldman says. “It’s really
a question of what’s logistically most efficient.”

An important characteristic of Tier 2 is frequent, brief assessments of student
progress, as often as once a week. “We’re working in Tier 2 so we know these kids
are already in trouble,” Feldman says. “We want to be able to ascertain if we are
moving in the right direction.”

For a small percentage of students, Tier 2 will not be enough. Those who don’t
make sufficient progress are eligible for the intensive intervention of Tier 3. For
some, that may mean one-to-one instruction; for others, special education services.
Each school or district will determine the relationship between RtI and special
education, but successful implementation of RtI ultimately will mean fewer
referrals to special education.

A program like RtI can feel like a sea change to classroom teachers—indeed, to
the whole school community—and the level of training fluctuates from district to
district. But people are at the heart of RtI. “While you can’t do RtI without a
responsive, efficient, and accurate assessment system, numbers are still just
numbers,” Feldman says. “You have to have human capital that’s informed,
passionate, and well organized. When a kid isn’t doing better, you get two or three
people who know the kid, know the curriculum, know the issues and you problem
solve together. Everything is on the table as long as it has some research base and
makes sense. And maybe you bring in a crackerjack speech and language person or
a really great reading specialist or someone from the district office who can help,
because we are, each of us, limited in our knowledge.”

When elements of RtI are in place and working—as, for example, in Elk Grove,
California, where a version of the model has been used for 15 years—overall
student achievement improves and the number of students placed in special
education declines.

Looking to the Future

Today, schools throughout California and around the country are adopting versions
of RtI to improve reading skills, and that suits Feldman just fine. “We know
absolutely that this notion of prevention and early intervention makes common
sense, even though organizing and managing it in the chaos and complexity of a
school will be fraught with all kinds of problems. We know scientifically and
empirically that discrepancy formulas make little sense and don’t work for kids.
Given that, it’s incumbent upon us to investigate sensible alternatives—like RtI.”