At the beginning of the year, everyone received a flipchart that shows the various tiers in a response to intervention model. It is time to take out that chart and turn to the tier 1 strategies for a review.

Tier 1 strategies are instructional strategies that take place in a general classroom.

Under Tier 1–when you have a concern about a student, you begin working with the student in the area of concrn as you normally would and keep a record of what you are doing with the student.  Then you use classroom measures of student progress to guide you in how the student is doing.  

Some examples of interventions include:

• Targeted assistance based on progress monitoring
• Provide additional instruction (individual, small group, technology assisted)
• Modify modes of task presentation
• Self-correct mistakes
• Increase task structure (directions, rationale, checks for understanding, feeback)
• Decrease group size
• Increase cues and prompts
• Teaching additional learning strategies–organizational/work habits
• Adjusting curriculum
• Adding intensive one to one or small group instruction
• Increase guided and independent practice
• Change types and method of corrective feedback

What is important with response to intervention is that you have what is called as “progress monitoring.”  This is when you take the time to step back and analyze the data and assessment results.  
1.  First you need baseline data of the student’s ability so you can compare them to the class
2.  In taking data of a class–are the majority below where mastery level is. If so, then the problem is instructional or curricular.
3.  If it is a small group of students who are not performing relative to the class then you develop a plan by defining the problem  “What are we going to do about it?”  The plan must be specific:
1.  what are we going to do differently
2.  who is going to do it
3.  when
4.  where
5. how long
6.  how will we measure progress

Discussion Question:  As we approach progress reports, what do you do when you see that students are struggling?  What RTI interventions do you find effective?  How do you monitor progress of those individual students?  Do you look at your class averages and student grades and analyze them for trends and weak areas?  Then what do you do?

Challenge yourself to look at the specific data to figure out the specific problem area each struggling student is having.  Then look to the RTI tier 1 interventions to implement.  Our goal is for all students to reach mastery of the learning standards and we may have to put into place new strategies to make that happen.