Practice Guide for reading and response to intervention
Posted by Beth DuBose on Apr 07, 2009
The federal Institute of Education Sciences has released a practice guide on reading instruction and response to intervention.
A strong response-to-intervention, or RTI, program for early-childhood reading should include screening of all pupils, small-group instruction three to five a times a week for children who are struggling, and monitoring of those struggling students at least once a month to see how they are responding to the intensive lessons, according to the guide. It was published on the ies Web site on Feb. 18 through the What Works Clearinghouse.
Russell Gersten, the chairman of the panel that developed the guide, stated that “[Response to Intervention] has the advantage of being efficient” in providing instruction to students who need extra help.
I found the guide in the Education Week article ‘What Works’ Guide Gives RTI Thumbs Up on Reading. Within the article, Education Week interviewed the director of the RTI Action Network, Kathleen Whitmire who said "the panel for the guide represented a good balance of researchers and practitioners. The guide authors also did a good job in describing certain pitfalls of implementation, and how they can be overcome."
The practice guide is the first on response to intervention that has been released through the What Works Clearinghouse. The guide includes five recommendations for schools to follow in adopting an RTI program:
- Recommendation 1. Screen all students for potential reading problems at the beginning of the year and again in the middle of the year. Regularly monitor the progress of students who are at elevated risk for developing reading disabilities.
- Recommendation 2. Provide differentiated reading instruction for all students based on assessments of students’ current reading levels (tier 1).
- Recommendation 3. Provide intensive, systematic instruction on up to three foundational reading skills in small groups to students who score below the benchmark
on universal screening. Typically, these groups meet between three and five times a week for 20 to 40 minutes (tier 2). - Recommendation 4. Monitor the progress of tier 2 students at least once a month. Use these data to determine whether students still require intervention.
For those students still making insufficient progress, school-wide teams should design a tier 3 intervention plan. - Recommendation 5. Provide intensive instruction on a daily basis that promotes the development of the various components of reading proficiency to students who show minimal progress after reasonable time in tier 2 small group instruction (tier 3).
The practice guide does not recommend specific programs that can be used to provide the intensive instruction that some students may need. It does offer suggestions, though, for how school personnel can make good choices of different programs for their students.