Jesse Steif: Welcome, everyone. Thank you again for joining us here for our third in the series of three of our technical assistance webinars oriented around multi-tiered systems of support.

​Our last session here is going to be talking about this concept of cohesion between Tier 1 instruction and Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention again.

My name is Jesse Steiff. I am the literacy content manager here at the Lastinger Center for Learning, and it’s my pleasure to be here kind of talking through what I think is an important subject, and one that I’ve been happy to see get a little bit more room in the discussion around multi-tiered systems of support and interventions for students with reading difficulties.

​So let’s kind of get into it here. Today we have a couple of expected outcomes. We’d like for everyone to leave here today, or if you’re watching after the fact, to be able to explain the relevance of reading intervention, that’s cohesive with Tier 1 instruction, we’ll talk all about what this concept of cohesion means and the implications for implementing interventions. 

We’d like for you to recognize when it is more and less important for cohesive intervention. Research is not unequivocal about super super aligned Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention with Tier 1 instruction. So we’ll talk about scenarios or student characteristics primarily where that cohesion may be more or less important. 

We’d like to help you to be able to plan for intervention when appropriate, that is aligned with Tier 1 instruction and to be able to apply some practical strategies for strengthening that alignment. 

We’ll take a look at some research studies and some instructional routines that have had powerful outcomes for students who are receiving interventions and kind of what specifically those instructional routines look like that support comprehension of tier one instruction.

​So before we get into it, I just wanted to set the tone and kind of get everyone thinking a bit about systems and implementation and structures that are part and parcel of a multi-tiered system of support. If you’re watching after the fact, go ahead and pause here. Actually, we encourage folks to engage in some discussion if you’re watching it in a group with some leaders or colleagues.

​We want to start everyone off by thinking about how often and in what ways that general education teachers, interventionists. If your school has interventionists and ESE teachers are all able to co-plan to support shared students and to support cohesive intervention that is supportive of Tier 1 instruction.

​When we think about who is providing interventions, often, it’s a general education teacher or an interventionist, and we do encourage folks to think about special education teachers as providing intervention. Specially designed instruction is not something that exists outside of a multi-tiered system of support and can happen during Tier 1, Tier 2 or Tier 3 as students tiered intervention.

​I encourage folks to, after the fact, take a look at a very informative document that was created by the good folks at the PSRTI project out of the University of South Florida. They’re a great group that does good technical assistance on MTSS. They have a document called ‘What’s So Special About Specially Designed Instruction’, and it provides you a little bit more information for special education teachers to understand kind of where specially designed instruction fits within that MTSS triangle.

​I wanted to underscore the importance of co-planning and leaders and educators building in time for co-planning to occur in order for intervention or specially designed instruction to be supportive of tier one instruction. 

It is just so important that our supplementary service providers are in those discussions and are aware of what texts are being used, what are the strategies that are being used, what content is being taught, when we do need a cohesive intervention and students in that group who benefit quite a bit from cohesive instruction.​

We’ve been using this word cohesion or cohesive instruction, so let’s talk about what exactly that is.​

You might hear about it in education, we use multiple words to refer to the same thing all the time, but you might hear about aligned intervention that is aligned with Tier 1 instruction, intervention that is cohesive with Tier 1 instruction. These things are all referring to the same thing.​

So cohesion in reading intervention refers to the degree of alignment between Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention and Tier 1 instruction, both in the content of what is being taught and the instructional steps, the routines and how it is being taught.

​So cohesive intervention can support students by reinforcing that Tier 1 content, by providing supportive materials, or using the same language or the same routines as Tier 1 instruction but just with a higher dosage or a higher intensity. 

And cohesive instruction or cohesive intervention, it’s not like intervention is either cohesive or it’s not. It’s something that runs on a continuum from less cohesive to more cohesive on the more cohesive end of intervention. 

You might have a Tier 2 intervention session that’s basically a pre-teach, perhaps narrowed a bit, a pre-teach of an upcoming Tier 1 lesson. So we’re giving students sort of a double dip, as it were, but maybe intensified in some way where maybe cutting out some unnecessary skills and focusing on sort of high leverage strategies.

​And then, on the other end of the continuum, we have less cohesive or totally unaligned intervention. So students are getting their Tier 1 instruction, according to whatever curriculum that you’re implementing, and then their intervention groups are something entirely different.

​Which might, for example, be a 5th grade student who is receiving Tier 1 instruction on general comprehension, reading and language, but they struggle with early decoding skills. Maybe they’re reading on a first or second grade decoding level and then their intervention is focused on silent E, or consonant digraphs or vowel teams or whatever the skill is. So it is very much different from the Tier 1 instruction. 

There’s no value assigned. More cohesive instruction is not necessarily better than less cohesive. It just depends on a student’s needs and the skills in which they need intervention and how well those align with Tier 1 instruction. We’ll get more about that in the coming content here.

​So cohesion means alignment in what is being taught and how it’s being taught.

​So very cohesive instruction intervention focuses on the same text or a related text, the same vocabulary, terms that are introduced and explicitly taught, or the same concepts from Tier 1 instruction.

​If you have students who may benefit from Tier 1 instruction, but may not be able to handle complex grade level text right then and there, we can bring in the context of Tier 2 related text sets. So maybe building background knowledge, using more simple texts and building our way up to a level of vocabulary and background knowledge where they might be able to better understand the more complex text being taught in Tier 1. 

It may focus on the very same skill that you’re teaching in Tier 1, but as a pre-teach or a reteach, like if your lesson is on finding the main idea or a particular set of vocabulary or we’re teaching a particular text structure like compare/contrast or sequencing or narrative story structure.

​We may provide intervention in that area as a pre-teach or a reteach, provided that the student doesn’t need some kind of more fundamental foundational skill, and so less moving towards the less aligned or less cohesive, but still supportive of  Tier 1.

​If I have a student who is, say, missing a prerequisite skill or we’re teaching text structure and for informational text or narrative text and we’re missing some key piece of underlying knowledge there, whether it’s about genre or some underlying piece of text structure knowledge, our Tier 2 instruction can actually can be supportive, and that can pre-teach that prior to your Tier 1 instruction (but it is supportive of Tier 1.) 

Cohesion also means alignment in how our content is being taught. So we will use consistent instructional routines, so the same lesson steps and the same error correction prompts. 

I know there are probably many of you out there, if you work in the elementary grades, you are either implementing or you’ve heard about the fantastic program UFLI Foundations, so I’ll use that as an example for instance, for instructional routines, because every lesson has a very, very clear sequence of steps. There’s a 10, I’m not sure the exact number of steps escapes me right at the moment, but say 10, there’s a 10-step lesson every day and a cohesive intervention that is a pre-teach or a reteach would use those same instructional steps, the same sort of language that students will hear again, or a narrowed number of those steps. So we might teach three or four or five components of the routine that a student struggled with in particular during Tier 1 instruction as a reteach in a cohesive intervention.

​Cohesive intervention might also entail shared tools or supports, such as:

• similar graphic organizers
• anchor charts 
• vocabulary words  
• strategies that students are already familiar with

One of the big challenges with a sort of lack of cohesion if we’re using an entirely new sort of program or curriculum might be different instructional routines. Different language to refer to the same concept can sometimes be confusing for students in intervention who are at risk and really require a lot more repetition and a lot more consistency.

​If my Tier 1 program is referring to “silent E,” but my intervention is referring to “magic E,” that can actually be a little confusing to primary students or elementary students. The other thing that is often confusing for students is when they’re sort of awash in a sea of worksheets and graphic organizers and other tools.

​At Tier 1, a lot of the sort of large basal curricula, there’s 5 tools there every single day that you could possibly use if you’re going to use every single thing that the curriculum includes good intervention. 

I would argue good intervention and Tier 1 instruction really cuts through a lot of the noise and might emphasize just a small number of tools of graphic organizers, for example, that are used more consistently over the course of the year where students can build a lot of automaticity and independence. 

That’s the point of a graphic organizer. A lot of the time is as a temporary scaffold. And if we keep throwing new and different ones at them all the time, every week and every unit, it becomes really challenging to remove those scaffolds in addition to all the administrative burden and the copying and things that you just need to do on a day-to-day basis.

​And we talked about a familiar instructional language. So routines, what we refer to skills and strategies as, and the vocabulary that we use is the same in Tier 1 instruction and Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention can go a long way to making things a lot easier to understand for kids.

​So we kind of talked about the 2 ends of this continuum, so we wanted to kind of include a little summary of these things. So when we talk about more and less cohesive intervention, we have standalone intervention, which are, you’re doing Tier 1, you’re implementing your curricula.

 Then for our Tier 2 or Tier 3 intervention, we’re using an entirely different curriculum or program and it’s implemented outside the reading block and the degree to which it’s related to Tier 1 instruction can vary. Versus embedded instruction, which again, the materials that you’re using for intervention are the ones that are embedded in the existing core reading program. They are aligned with your core classroom instruction, and they are generally created by the publishers to reinforce Tier 1 skill, or to teach a prerequisite skill.

​So benefits and weaknesses of a high level of cohesion, using those embedded materials. Again, same instructional routines, using similar language, we talked about that. Less expense, we don’t need to purchase other separate Tier 2 or Tier 3 materials if we are doing a pre-teach or a reteach of Tier 1 content.

So again, not an insubstantial benefit, because oftentimes intervention programs are very, very, expensive, although I would say there are plenty of inexpensive options out there, though, as well. 

On the weaker side, there are very few curriculum resources that have actually been empirically evaluated, tested rigorously in students and found to be beneficial over a control group. In fact, the vast majority of the materials that we use across the State and across the country are not evidence-based, meaning they haven’t been studied and carefully controlled, scientific settings and studies. We would be out of 2 out of instructional tools if we only limited ourselves to ones that are evidence-based. So I’m not saying that that’s a major problem.

​But Tier 1 instruction materials largely haven’t been studied. Now, there are many of them that have, and you can be one of the factors that can make you more comfortable with using a tightly aligned or a tightly cohesive Tier 2 intervention that is a double dip of your Tier 1 is, if you’re using a very strong, evidence-based, validated Tier 1 instructional program.

​I’ll come back to, for example, UFLi Foundations, for our primary audience who aren’t still teaching foundational skills in those early elementary years, you can be very comfortable implementing a second dose or a second small group of aUFLI Foundations, for example, knowing that your Tier 1 instruction is aligned with evidence, and particularly, if what your students are struggling with is decoding, fluency and phonological awareness, the areas that your Tier 1 instruction are currently teaching.

​One of the primary considerations that we’ve been kind of talking about here is the degree of cohesion between intervention and instruction is less important, the bigger the gap is between where a student needs instruction and what you’re teaching in tier one. 

So, because your Tier 2 intervention and your Tier  3 intervention needs to focus on the most foundational prerequisite skills for students who are with moderate to more significant reading difficulties, oftentimes the gap between what they need to be taught and what is being taught in Tier 1 is wide enough that you couldn’t possibly align your Tier 2 intervention with your Tier 1 instruction super tightly because you’d be teaching them because they need a lot. They need more foundational or prerequisite skills. 

You’d be teaching far above the level that they need or the set of skills they need. It’s a major consideration. That becomes a lot more relevant, especially as kids get older. 

Again, in grades K, through 2. When gaps are a little bit smaller, Tier 1 is focused partially on decoding and foundational skills. That is where I would say the sweet spot is between super tight alignment between your tiered intervention, and your Tier 1 instruction.

​So just some considerations and benefits.

​So we talked about primary students who are kind of having difficulties in decoding, benefiting from tightly aligned high cohesion. Let’s talk about another group of students who may also benefit from a high level of cohesion.

​If you’re an intermediate teacher, or if you’re a middle school or high school teacher, you likely know the students or you know this particular skill profile that I’m about to describe to you.

​So for this student, their early decoding skills are largely intact. Right? They can accurately read most single-syllable words. Right? So they’re so those kindergarten/first grade skills are not the primary issue for this, for this kind of group of students.

​What are the issues with this group of students is their advanced decoding, multi-syllable word reading. So their ability to put multiple syllables together, to read, content area words and higher level vocabulary words like continental or irrelevant or encourage really sort of wreaks havoc with both your fluency as well as your comprehension, because these are the exact kinds of words that tend to hold a disproportionately high amount of the meaning of the text that kids are reading. So if you’re struggling with multi-syllable word decoding or reading, it’s really beneficial and absolutely necessary that we remediate those sorts of skills.

​Again, they may also struggle with reading fluency. So in addition to their multi-syllable word reading issues, they may read kind of quite a bit slower than more typically developing peers.

​And along with those other kinds of foundational skill difficulties comes issues with knowledge of vocabulary and academic language. So students who may not have as wide or deep of a base of background knowledge may struggle with more figurative or abstract language, and they may struggle with kind of more complex sentence structures, like sentences that have a couple of clauses and multiple commas and other sort of embedded structures there. 

Again, what kind of comes along with that are issues because there’s lots of these more foundational skills that are getting in the way they tend to struggle with really high leverage comprehension strategies like summarizing and paraphrasing. There are tons and tons of different comprehension strategies that are out there and included in Tier 1 curriculum, but if I were to have to choose a couple of key ones to really focus on and make sure students are good at and are and are doing on a day-to-day basis. When they’re reading complex text, it would be summarizing and paraphrasing. There’s a lot there to that, and a ton of research to back that up.

For a student like this, we’re somewhere through our secondary grades, we kind of have this profile of difficulty. One of the first questions that we often get is, “How do I support the student? I’ve been providing them with their instructional level text.”

Maybe they’re a sixth grader reading on a second or third grade level. “I’ve been providing them with second or third grade level text.”

​That is an area we wanted to sort of highlight here and ask a directive question. For this intermediate secondary student, what kind of text is best suited to support their needs?

​If you’re watching this online, go ahead and pause and kind of jot some thoughts down, or chat with your shoulder partner. If you’re watching at home, kind of think about students that you’ve had who have issues similar to these and what sort of texts that you have provided to them in the past. 

I will say, as a former elementary school teacher myself, this is a training that I wish that I had in my teacher prep, or in my early years in the classroom. I very much was trained and taught and held on to keeping my quote unquote, lower, performing readers in lower level, less complex text. What I now know is that I likely contributed to an accumulation of when students get a sort of steady text diet of low level, less complex text with lower-level vocabulary and less abstract concepts.

​Well, that’s that we are sort of systematically not exposing them to the vocabulary, the academic language, the language structures that they need–in order for their progress to be accelerated.

​If you are a student who is struggling with kindergarten and first grade level decoding skills, regardless of your age, there’s research to support the use of less complex text, decodable books and non-predictable leveled text that is less complex while students are sort of building up their decoding muscles. But once they have a certain basic minimum level of decoding, and that’s not the main constraint of their ability to access text, we should be in the business of really opening these students up to more and more complex text.

​There’s an interesting sort of connection here. There’s this concept that’s kind of a bit of a deep cut in research, it’s called the decoding threshold hypothesis.

​And it’s a newer theory, but one that has some really convincing evidence that says there’s a certain level of decoding skill below which your comprehension just does not improve regardless of your age. So if your reading is sufficiently inaccurate and you’re unable to read below a certain level, your comprehension can’t rise past that, because you just can’t read the text accurately enough to glean meaning.

​But above that threshold, your comprehension does improve, and that threshold is not perfect accuracy. You know that threshold is likely somewhere close to being solid with your early decoding skills and just needing some extra support to read multi-syllable words. And once you’re at that level, there really is every incentive for us as teachers to scaffold complex text for those students, rather than to lower the complexity of the text as the main scaffold for their instruction.

​There’s some excellent writing out there about using complex text for our Tier 2 intervention, the same text that students are reading at Tier 1. And there are some misconceptions. This is an article from 2018 that did a really nice synthesis or summary of some of the major misconceptions out there that these slides are based on. 

The 1st one is, readers are more engaged and can learn more from easier text. I was trained to believe that. But we know that student choice and interest are greater predictors of engagement and learning than the text complexity if strong instruction is in place.

​This is not us saying that we could just plop a grade level text in front of a struggling student and just go for it, they should be able to read it. Absolutely not. It is hard work to scaffold this struggling student into reading complex text. 

​Reading easier texts leads to greater gains than providing intervention for students with complex text. That’s another misconception that’s out there.

​There are studies that have compared groups of struggling students. Same level of reading skill. One group gets reading instruction with easier text, another group gets reading instruction with more grade level, complex text in intervention.

​And then there are control groups that don’t get anything, and they compare their growth. Generally what happens is that both groups show similar gains in reading comprehension when effective scaffolds are provided and given all things being held equal, less complex or more complex text. I’m going to choose to provide a student with the complex text every single time, so as not to keep contributing to that student’s steady diet of simple text that doesn’t expand their vocabulary, background knowledge and academic language.

​Some readers cannot read complex text. Research shows that past a certain level, when the teacher provides the sort of targeted scaffold and intervention, students’ comprehension of challenging text is similar to comprehension of easier text when we provide these sorts of supports that we’ll take a look at. (There’s the reference there for that paper.)

​So some key takeaways here about interventions that are tightly aligned and cohesive with Tier 1 instruction and use the same text as Tier 1 instruction. 

If we have intermediate or secondary students who have mild to moderate difficulties in decoding and language they absolutely can benefit from intervention that is tightly aligned with, and uses the same text as Tier 1 instruction as a pre-teach.

​But students with those with more significant early decoding difficulties, whether they are in grades K through two or they’re older students with more severe decoding issues, they do benefit from less cohesive instruction. If they’re older, they use decodable or leveled text.

​So let’s talk about those instructional routines that are tightly aligned with Tier 1 instruction that focuses on sort of high yield, a narrowed focus of really good, strong, evidence-based strategies that are known to improve students, comprehension of complex text in the context of Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention.

​So in terms of text selection, we’re using the same text from the Tier 1 lesson, whether that’s a science text, a social studies text, an ELA text. In terms of word study, we might pre-teach words that we predict students are likely to struggle with. This does take a good amount of pre-planning, certainly at a minimal level having gone through the text that students are going to be. We know students are going to be reading, to choose those multi-syllable words, choose those advanced vocabulary words and to pre-teach how to decode, how to decode those words based on any prefixes or suffixes, how many syllables they have. The session is not necessarily about advanced decoding routines. There are a number of really good ones out there.

​This in term and building fluency. For students with fluency difficulties, we often want to flip the order of instruction that we typically might think of where first we teach the text, and we teach our comprehension strategy, then we do some fluency building and practice. But for Tier 2 intervention that’s super aligned with Tier 1, we would actually want to have students build fluency first, so that they are so that they have built up some accuracy and good rate, and they’re doing warm reads by the time. By the time you’re teaching it, or it is being taught in tier one the next day or the next week.

​So we can use repeated reading protocols like partner reading, echo reading or repeated reading, to have to give students a couple of reps with the key portions, the whole piece of text or the passages that they’re going to be learning about later on.

​Same thing with vocabulary support. We want to pre-teach the key tier two vocabulary. When we say Tier two, I’m not referring to Tier 2 intervention. Referring to these to a separate sort of tiered way of thinking about words.

​Tier one words are basic, everyday words that appear in conversation, ‘run’, ‘happy’, ‘the’, ‘with’

​Tier two words are considered academic vocabulary words that happen across different content areas.

‘Compare’ or ‘synthesize,’ things that kids would encounter in a social studies text or an ELA text or a science text that are not your sort of bolded words. The tier three word is your content area-specific word that are typically bolded in the textbook things like photosynthesis, or congressional legislature, things that are specific to science or social studies or math [or] language skills.

We want to focus on building relevant background knowledge before reading. So a Tier 2 intervention that’s supporting Tier 1 complex text might build background knowledge by showing students videos or having them work through semantic or vocabulary maps, and may actually use some simpler text as an initial scaffold to build students up to reading more complex text.

​It may also ask students to do things like after every paragraph or after every after a key section, we write a gist statement, or basically a 10 word brief summary of the major, who, what, when, where and how of what you just read.

We can take multiple gist statements and combine them into bigger summaries of different effective interventions strategies using that sort of protocol.

The other thing that I might do as a pre-teach is to take a good amount of knowledge of the text that students are going to be reading, teaching them about particularly challenging sentences that they’re going to encounter. We tend not to think about sentence-level difficulties as a major contributor to students reading comprehension difficulties, but we’re learning a lot more about how that actually is the case.

​We can use things like sentence decomposition, where we’re actually breaking a single sentence down that may have multiple phrases or clauses in them and teaching students about where to break when they’re reading (what each clause is, if there’s a subject and several pronouns in that sentence, to whom are the the pronouns referring to.) This is highly cohesive instruction with Tier 1.

​We wanted to note here that informed opinions of researchers and expert educators differ on how important cohesion is in between intervention and instruction.

​So this is a quote from a document called an IES Practice Guide. If you’re not familiar with the IES Practice Guides, if you’re watching this later pause the video right now and Google IES Practice Guides. These are amazing compilations of practitioner-oriented guidance, that is based on tons of research. It is put out by the Institute for Educational Sciences, which is the research-to-practice arm of the Federal Department of Education. There’s 20 or 30 IES Practice Guides on various topics ranging from RTI, to supporting students in elementary school, to supporting adolescent writing skills in high school and everywhere and everything in between.

​This is a quote from one of the IES practice guides that kind of hits on a point we mentioned. Because Tier 2 intervention has to focus on the most foundational and prerequisite skills, as kids get older and as reading issues get more severe, it’s unlikely that the skills that are being addressed in Tier 1 are the ones that you’re gonna need to address in Tier 2 and Tier 3.

​This guide indicated that alignment is not as critical for groups with much more severe reading issues, older students, and ensuring that your instruction and your intervention is systematic and explicit. It focuses on those sort of most foundational high-priority components of reading, decoding if students need it and fluency building vocabulary.

​From another more recent paper, we have a quote here from a study that we’ll talk about, 

“Although Tier 2 instruction benefits various struggling readers, emerging research documents the importance of aligning Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction to support the comprehension of informational text in the upper grades.”

​So what we hope that you come away with here is that more cohesion or less cohesion is not better or worse. Again, the degree to which your intervention aligns with and is supportive of Tier 1 instruction should depend on the student and on the content being taught in Tier 1 and the gap between what a student needs and what is being taught in Tier 1.

​So I thought, when I was in my teacher prep program which I will not name, I wish I was provided with more guidance, more specific studies, on what research has to say, what does instruction look like when we talk about research-based instruction. 

I never really understood what groups of intervention researchers and teachers were actually doing. And because I never had the opportunity to really put a magnifying glass onto key representative studies. And so I always want to take some opportunity to go over some research when we’re doing technical assistance with partners, while also remaining very much aware that this needs to be relevant to you. 

So we’re not going to talk about statistics or anything overly technical. We’re going to talk about the instruction that research studies have used and what they found in order to inform our understanding of this concept of cohesion.

​So there’s a study from a relatively recent one from 2017, there’s the title of it there. The team of researchers were the wonderful folks at the Florida Center for Reading Research, and a couple of other folks out of FSU, did this great study where they looked at the effectiveness of 2 approaches to early literacy intervention in grades K through two. 

55 schools, so a very big study, were looking at students who are at risk. They were screened and they’re reading below grade level in those primary grades.

​What they wanted to do was look at the effects of providing Tier 1 instructions. They provided the same Tier 1 instruction to all students, but to one group they provided a super aligned cohesive Tier 2 instruction, and to the other group they provided a basically a standalone Tier 2 intervention that had an entirely different scope and sequence on different instructional routines.

​So when you’re looking at the duration of this study, the students got some pretty intensive intervention. They got 45 minutes every day, 30 minutes of which were for decoding and 15 minutes per day for language intervention as part of a pull out Tier 2 intervention over 27 weeks.

​Then you have the groups there aligned and unaligned.

​So let’s take a look at the specifics here. For both students, the curriculum was HMH Journeys, which was the curriculum that this school district was using at the time. And this study is not commenting, nor are we commenting, on the effectiveness of HMH Journeys. But just to say that both groups got the same Tier 1 instruction. 

For the decoding component, the standalone group got an entirely different program, one called Sound Partners, which is a great intervention. It is evidence-based, it’s been studied, it’s been the subject of probably close to 20 studies over the past 20 years or so now, and is a solidly evidence-based phonics program that also builds fluency and spelling. The aligned intervention got the Journey Strategic Intervention, which was the built-in intervention that aligned with the Journey’s instruction. 

The oral language component, again for the Standalone group, they got a separate program, two separate programs, one called Bridge of Vocabulary, three times a week, and one called Language in Motion twice a week. Then the aligned language got HMH-aligned intervention called Curious About Words. It’s vocabulary instruction that was a reteach of, I believe, the vocabulary instruction in Tier 1.

​Both groups, in terms of fidelity, the intervention was provided by trained paraprofessionals and certified teachers and delivered as intended.

​There were no significant differences in most reading and language outcomes across K-2.

​Students in both groups made some pretty significant gains, 13 to 25 percentile points in reading. Imagine your students going from the 25th percentile to the 50th percentile on FAST. That is nothing to shake a stick at. That’s very good, and 6 to 25 points in language outcomes. A notable difference, though, second grade students did much better in spelling, the students who did sound partners could be, and the authors of the program said it’s probably more related to the effectiveness of sound partners rather than the alignment between Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction in the embedded group.

​Kindergarten English learners also perform better in phonological awareness in the embedded model. Take that for what you make.

​But largely, no significant differences between highly aligned super cohesive and stand alone when we’re talking about this group for K-2 students who are struggling.

​So let’s talk about comprehension intervention with intermediate students.

​Another great more recent study out of 2024 effects of Tier 2 reading intervention aligned to Tier 1 instruction, and this group looked at 4th grade students with inattention difficulties and reading difficulties. 

There was an earlier study that just that didn’t isolate students with inattention and found the same thing. So let’s talk about this study.

​So 108 fourth graders across nine schools with comprehension difficulties and inattention. This group of students had both students with disabilities and without disabilities. So this mixed in there were students with IEPs for specific learning disabilities, and other health impairment for ADHD, but also general education students as well. The mix of reading difficulties was also relatively high.

​So both groups got high quality, and, interestingly enough, they looked at tier one reading instruction through social studies instruction.

​Quick call out for the importance of not forgetting social studies. Good social studies instruction is good reading instruction.

One group got a high-quality Tier 1 social studies instruction and super cohesive aligned Tier 2 intervention. The other group got whatever the district was doing for social studies instruction and the same Tier 2 intervention that the first group got. So what they were manipulating was actually the Tier 1 instruction. The intervention happened three times a week for 18 weeks, and the intervention sessions were 40 minutes.

So let’s look at what this instructional routine is for Tier 1 and Tier 2. Because I think, I would have found this so very helpful to see what really effective, highly scaffolded, good instruction looks like in Tier 1 that’s supportive of comprehension.

So they broke the routine down into before, during and after reading before reading the teacher and the teacher kind of states before the unit began the big ideas and built and connected new learning to prior learning. They built background knowledge by watching videos, reading other texts and looking at illustrations and talking about the concepts through structured discussion. There was pre-teaching of key vocabulary words with vocabulary maps where each map kind of had the definition of the word, examples, non-examples, using it in a sentence and setting the purpose for each Social studies comprehension, lesson with purpose, setting questions that then became text-dependent questions.

​During reading, there were different kinds of reading protocols depending on how skilled the students were. Sometimes there was partner reading, for then there was silent reading for students who were a little bit more accurate and fluent and teacher read aloud for students with more significant decoding difficulties.

​During reading these the teachers stopped to ask text-dependent questions and to engage in structured discussion. And I think, like I mentioned before, the class stopped at key points after each paragraph to generate a gist statement or to generate a main idea of each paragraph, and they used a graphic organizer that was consistent throughout the intervention, the same structure, and wrote their gist statements. So this intervention also effectively integrates, or the instruction effectively integrates, writing into reading as well.

​After reading, the students revisited their vocabulary maps, they filled out additional pieces to how the vocabulary relates to the text that they read. They wrote sentences using those key vocabulary terms, and then they took all those individual gist statements that they wrote and combined them to form a structured sort of sequence of paragraphs to write a longer, fuller summary in paragraph form.

​That was effective Tier 1 instruction. So, for the aligned Tier 2 intervention, the before reading was the same, but the students who were getting the intervention got this instructional routine before the full class did it in Tier 1. So they got a pre-teach of this, the same instruction during reading and after reading, the only difference between Tier 1 and tier 2 instruction after reading was that the Tier 2 instruction didn’t have enough time for students to build those full summaries from the gist statements.

​So when we talk about tightly aligned intervention, boy, it’s almost the same exact thing, provided you have really good, tight, evidence-based, strong Tier One instruction. That’s when it becomes very, very important.

​So it shouldn’t surprise you, but the aligned Tier 1 / Tier 2 group was statistically significant, better gains and then the unaligned Tier 1 and Tier 2 group. The aligned group had much stronger growth in social studies, content, knowledge, vocabulary and comprehension in writing.

​So using those same texts, the same strategies across tiers, they help students consolidate that learning. That’s not the 1st time that they’re hearing it and doing those activities in Tier 1 when we have this tightly aligned instruction, it reduced this cognitive load, all of the different sorts of routines and words that kids tend to have to juggle in their short-term memory, all the steps and the processes were already really familiar to them in terms of the instructional routine. 

After the kids got used to that instructional routine, they didn’t have to worry about that stuff. They knew what to expect and they weren’t left not understanding how to write a gist statement, how to write a paragraph and what was coming next in the lesson.

​The authors of the study indicated that the planning, the coordination between who’s between the intervention provider and the classroom teacher was critical for maximizing that Tier 2 intervention you couldn’t. You couldn’t do something like this without the Tier 2 intervention provider, whether it’s an ESE teacher or an interventionist, you can’t do this type of stuff without really tight co-planning between them and the classroom teachers, so that they know the text, they know the instructional routine and they’re able to really align their instruction with that routine.

​So some key takeaways here. I just highlighted a couple of studies, but two studies doesn’t make a body of research. We do need more research on the effect of cohesion. Oftentimes, multiple studies will find different things, and it’s not until we get enough studies together that are all finding something similar that we start to really have a base of research that we can base our instruction on. 

Research does not absolutely support alignment between Tier 2 and Tier 1 for all students at all grades who need intervention. These are students who need intervention in K-12, it’s not a homogeneous group. They have much different instructional needs, and our approaches to intervention need to be based on that and differentiated.

​So in some cases, a standalone Tier 2 intervention is equally or more effective than one that is totally aligned with Tier 1 and alignment between Tier 1 and Tier 2. Again, just to reiterate it is more important when we have Tier 1 instruction that is evidence-based. So we think about our UFLI foundations, for example, doesn’t mean that’s the only evidence-based strong phonics program, but it’s really a fantastic one.

Or when we talk about that instructional routine that we just looked at with social studies, that instructional, that curriculum, that approach the acronym is strive in case you want to take a look at it afterward. There’s a lot of free, open source materials for STRIVE. It’s an acronym. I forget exactly what it stands for, but if you go to STRIVE, and you look at a center out of the University of Texas, called the Meadows Center for reducing educational risk. 

There are excellent resources there on Strive. In addition to a ton of other excellent resources that the Meadow Center puts out. They are a wonderful organization that you can bet your bottom dollar that they will have content that is aligned with what you want.

So alignment is more important when Tier 1 instruction is evidence-based, and what your students need intervention in aligns with what is being taught in Tier 1.

​As the difficulties get more severe, and the gap between what you’re teaching in Tier 1, and what you need to teach in Tier 2, as that gets bigger, the alignment becomes less important.

​No, which I got ahead of myself there, as the gap between the skill deficit and the skills are smaller.

For some applications for leaders here, I know we have a lot of teachers here on the call, and mostly teachers who have been watching and providing us excellent feedback. Thank you so much. There are really important sort of processing questions that we want, that we would put on the plates of leadership in light of this information around these concepts of collaboration and capacity building.

​So first, this is really challenging to do. Students who require intervention require the most skilled educators in the building.

​For some folks who are watching, they may say, “Yeah, of course, that makes total sense. That is exactly what we’re doing for others.’ They may hear that and go. ‘Huh! What do you mean? We have volunteers or community members or kind of minimally trained folks.” 

But I think there’s a medical analogy here that’s applicable.

​We need for a medically complex patient to have access to the highest level of skill of a physician, and not only that, but in the case of complex medical issues, a physician who is able to collaborate and plan with other service providers. So if you have an autoimmune disorder that affects your kidneys and your skin and your lungs, your medical team is necessarily going to have to include a rheumatologist and a hematologist, and all these other folks and your care depends on a number of highly skilled folks who are all collaborating with one another and co-planning their treatment.

​Now in the medical field, I know that that often does not happen, and the metaphor there is kind of applicable in education, because there are lots of times when that collaboration is also not happening.

​So our interventionists, our specially designed instruction providers and Gen. Ed. teachers need to be in very close contact with one another in order for interventions to not only be effective but to be effective enough to accelerate students’ gains so that they don’t need to stay in intervention for the rest of their school career. Interventions should accelerate a student up to grade level, so should spur faster than average growth compared to typically developing readers.

​And we just do not see how you would do that without tight collaboration, intensive intervention and intervention that focuses on complex grade level standards. How else can we get students back up to grade level but by providing highly scaffolded intensive instruction focused on complex text.

​Leaders should understand the importance of ongoing professional development and intervention implementation and database decision-making for intervention providers for specially designed instruction providers. There’s a term that I’m not sure where I heard it, but it’s drive-by professional development, where we decide that a group of students, or it’s an individual student, needs an intervention and we have it in the resource room. A coach, an AP, someone comes by and drops off and drops off the box of intervention materials, maybe has a conversation about where to find about where to find them.

​That is, we’re setting students and intervention providers up for failure with something like that, because, much like, the teachers need ongoing coaching and professional learning on curriculum implementation, interventionists and esc teachers need ongoing, coaching and intervention professional learning on the materials that they are also implementing if they’re doing something standalone.

​And so this all falls under the umbrella of a multi-tiered system of support. We need to make sure that our master schedules are aligned enough, or that we have communication channels that allow for co-planning, between grade level teams, intervention providers and special education teachers.

​That’s a really tall order, I know. And we know it is. And sometimes there’s just a math problem that the time doesn’t exist, and you just can’t make all the components fit. And that’s a real thing, this is not an easy challenge to face or challenge to tackle. But we found that if co-planning during the day is not feasible, that there are other ways to build in communication channels between intervention providers and Gen. Ed. teachers. We just need to up the collaboration and communication across all the staff that work with individual students and share students.

​So if you’re doing some ongoing planning and discussion after these webinars, if you’re a district that is watching these these technical assistance videos together and you are in a position of leadership, we have some key questions, some key driving questions for you to ask yourself, in terms of systems, that ensure that there’s this close communication and clear understanding about what’s going on in Tier 1.

​How we are investing in the professional growth of our intervention providers and ESE teachers to ensure that they have the expertise to work with our most complex, our highest need students, and we need to be the highest skilled folks in the building. Everyone needs to be skilled, of course, but students, but specially designed instruction providers need to be at the top of that list, and how we can. And let’s engage in some ongoing problem-solving with how we can strengthen these areas.

For our teachers and interventionists and ESE teachers, perhaps this is being redundant here or beating a dead horse. It’s a weird saying; we emphasize collaboration is key–we want to engage in ongoing, co-planning, and consultation. Much more so than if you have a student who’s on consult, for example, if you have an IEP, if you’re a case manager, once a quarter, or once a month is likely not gonna be enough to really ensure that students are being accelerated.

​We want to have those communication channels in which we’re able to share student data, what we’re what students are and are not struggling with, what strategies we’re implementing a student’s ongoing progress monitoring data and to use, if available, common planning time or common meeting time to align those supports.

​Because we need that detailed understanding of what’s being taught in order for that cohesive instruction to happen. And that’s again very, very challenging.

​Particularly in secondary grades and middle and high school. Departmental planning is an even bigger math problem than it is for elementary school.

​But I would argue similarly, or more important than it is for elementary school.

​There’s a lot of interesting research, and there’s a lot of reason to believe that, you know the content of, say, an intensive reading course, or the content of specially designed instruction. If your students are able to access complex text with strong scaffolds, should be aligned with the science text that students are reading or the social studies text that they’re reading, or the ELA text.

​So we’re gonna end a little bit early here today, about 15 min early. But I wanted to leave you with a quote here that we felt was apt, which is, “How implementation occurs matters just as much as what is being implemented.”

We can have the most effective curricula, we can have the best set of strategies that money can buy, but  if there are issues with your implementation, if we don’t have ongoing professional learning, coaching support for teachers who need it, then your outcomes are not gonna be are not gonna be as strong as what they could be.

​There are no shortcuts. You can’t buy your way out of well-trained teachers functioning within systems that allow for really close communication between different parts of the system between leadership and instructional personnel and among instructional personnel.

​Having a strong curriculum is one piece of the puzzle, but it is not the only piece of the puzzle, and we would argue that a well-trained teacher and a well-functioning system is more important than the curriculum materials that you’re using.

​We have some references here. In case you all would like to take a look and take a pause on this screen.

​And we really  very much appreciate the time that everyone is spending here over the summer. Enjoy a found time of 15 min. Thank you so much. We hope that these webinars kind of spur some conversation between you and your teams, or within you, and kind of give you some ideas moving into next year. 

Our contact information is here on the slide.

​Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for what you do, and take care.