Recommendation 5 Provide Intensive Daily Instruction to Students Who Need More Intervention (Tier 3)

1. Institute Education Sciences K-3 RTI for Reading Practice Guide Recommendation 5Provide Intensive Daily Instruction to Students Who Need More Intervention(Tier 3) Level of Evidence: Low

2. Instruction for Tier 3 Students Provide intensive instruction for students who need more than Tier 2. • Focus on fewer high priority reading skills. • Schedule multiple and extended instructional sessions. • Provide small group instruction. • Provide more opportunities to practice and respond. • Provide corrective feedback. • Teach to mastery. • Teach at each student’s skill level.

3. Instruction for Tier 3 Students Monitor Progress • Use appropriate progress monitoring measures. • Use progress monitoring data to determine if a team of professionals needs to refine the instructional program to enhance achievement growth.

4. Research to Support the Recommendation 5 Studies met the standard. None showed statistically significant impacts on reading outcomes.

5. Research to Support the Recommendation The material below represents the opinion of the panel. • After 50 years of research, gaps remain in the knowledge of how to teach reading to the 3 to 5 percent of students with severe reading difficulties. • Research reveals little about students whose response to typically effective interventions is low.

6. How to Carry Out the Recommendation

7. Carrying Out the Recommendation 1. Implement concentrated instruction that is focused on a small but targeted set of reading skills. • Too many instructional objectives can overwhelm students. • Diagnostic assessments can determine which reading skills need to be addressed. • Care should be taken that instruction addresses high priority skills such as decoding rather than secondary skills such as summarizing, clarification or comprehension monitoring.

8. Carrying Out the Recommendation Implement concentrated instruction that is focused on a small but targeted set of reading skills. • While phonemic awareness and decoding are critical skills, students still need some instruction every week on comprehension and vocabulary. • Modeling, practice and corrective feedback are critical for explicit instruction. • A sustained 90% mastery of any skill should be expected before moving on.

9. Carrying Out the Recommendation 2. Adjust the overall lesson pace. • To provide greater focus, adjust the overall lesson pace so it is slow and deliberate. • Teachers might focus on only one component and spread instruction on that component over several lessons.

10. Carrying Out the Recommendation 3. Schedule multiple and extended instructional sessions daily. • Studies suggest that tier 3 students require more reading instructional time than their peers without reading difficulties. • Tier 3 students currently receive additional instructional times ranging from 45 to 120 minutes per week. • The panel suggests an additional 30 minutes per day of instruction in a “double dose”. A teacher might introduce a skill in the first session and practice and review the skill in the “double dose”. • Further research is required to examine the total hours of instruction needed and relative impact of tier 3 duration.

11. Carrying Out the Recommendation 4. Provide opportunities for practice and feedback with one-to-one or small group instruction. • Tier 3 students might require 10 to 30 times the practice opportunities as their peers. • Technology might provide the means for providing tier 3 students practice. • One-to-one or small group instruction provides the greatest opportunity for continuous and active learning. • Teachers can increase opportunities to respond by encouraging unison group responses. • Error correction should consist of a model, another opportunity to respond, and a return to the missed item later in the lesson to reinforce the correct response.

12. Carrying Out the Recommendation 5. Plan and individualize tier 3 instruction using input from a school-based RTI team. • For students in tier 3, instruction must be planned and scaffolded individually. • Teachers should begin with easier tasks and progress to more difficult tasks. • Concrete material supports, visuals, and manipulatives are helpful. • Teachers can optimize instructional time by teaching skills or strategies that reinforce each other. For example, emerging research suggests that teaching spelling promotes reading for struggling readers. Practice in using the alphabetic strategy to spell words seems to transfer to reading words.

13. Carrying Out the Recommendation 6. Ensure that tier 3 students master a reading skill or strategy before moving on. • Teachers should keep notes on how students perform on different reading tasks. • Notes could include the exact words or skills a student practices as well as the number of times it takes for students to practice a word before reading in accurately.

14. Roadblocks and Suggested Approaches The distinction between Tier 2 and Tier 3 instructional interventions can often be blurry. • At present, distinctions between tier 2 and tier 3 are not clear or well documented. The terms are conveniences for school personnel. • Some students may receive instruction in both tier 3 (decoding and fluency) and tier 2 (vocabulary and comprehension). • Small heterogeneous groups are optimal for building student language.

15. Roadblocks and Suggested Approaches Some tier 3 students have instruction that focuses only on decoding and reading fluency. • Targeting important comprehension proficiencies need to be part of any solid tier 3 intervention.

16. Roadblocks and Suggested Approaches School and staff resources may be too limited to support individualized instruction for Tier 3 students. • Teachers should always introduce new skills. • For practice, consider creative alternatives: • Community resources such as parents and senior citizens • Technology

17. Roadblocks and Suggested Approaches Schools tend to give the least experienced teachers the hardest kids to teach. • The most experienced and trained teachers and specialists should teach tier 3 students. • This may require professional development or ongoing mentoring. • Teachers of tier 3 students should be experts at effective teaching strategies.

18. Roadblocks and Suggested Approaches Adding additional instructional sessions can be overwhelming for some students and challenging for some schools. • Teachers should think of many ways to motivate students who need a great deal of reading instruction and keep them interested and engaged. • Schools might have to give students reading instruction in times normally allocated for other subjects such as science or social studies. • Primary students must become proficient in foundational reading skills before going into higher grades.

19. Roadblocks and Suggested Approaches Some tier 3 students do not catch-up despite intensive, one-to-one instruction. • Remind school staff that a school’s goal is to help each student reach proficient reading levels if possible. • Obtaining significant progress should be the primary goal.