What is Needed to Supplement Tier 3 Reading Interventions?

           Before we dive fully into what is needed to effectively supplement Tier 3 reading interventions, let’s review what it means to have phonemic and phonological awareness.  Ideally, there is no argument that phonemic and phonological awareness is an essential competency for emergent literacy. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992).

Phonemic awareness is essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system, because letters represent sounds or phonemes.  Without phonemic awareness, phonics makes little sense.  Phonemic awareness is fundamental to mapping speech to print.  For instance, if a child cannot hear that "man" and "moon“ begin with the same sound or is unable to blend the sounds /rrrrrruuuuuunnnnn/ into the word "run",  then he or she may have great difficulty connecting sounds with their written symbols or blending sounds to make a word.

A phoneme is a speech sound.  A phoneme is the smallest unit of spoken language.  It has no inherent meaning (National Reading Panel, 2000).  Phonemic awareness involves hearing language at the phoneme level. Phonemic awareness is not phonics.  Phonemic awareness is auditory and does not involve words in print.  Phonemic awareness is important because it teaches students to attend to sounds. Phonemic awareness primes the connection of sound to print.  Phonemic awareness gives students a way to approach reading new words.  Phonemic awareness helps students understand the alphabetic principle whereby letters in words are systematically represented by sounds.

Phonics, is the use of the code (sound-symbol relationships to recognize words.  Phonological awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sound structure of language. This is an encompassing term that involves working with the sounds of language at the word, syllable, and phoneme level.

Phonemic and phonological awareness is difficult because although the English language includes 26 letters, there are approximately 40 phonemes.  Sounds are represented in 250 different spellings.  For instance, /f/ as in ph, f, gh, ff.  Research has established that children lacking phonemic and phonological awareness skills exhibit difficulty grouping words with similar and dissimilar sounds (mat, mug, sun), blending and splitting syllables (sun-ny), blending sounds into words (m_a_n), segmenting a word as a sequence of sounds (e.g., fish is made up of three phonemes, /f/ ,/i/, /sh/), detecting and manipulating sounds within words (change “r” in “run” to “s” to make “sun”), (Kame'enui, et. al., 1997).

Most research-based reading intervention programs utilize a phonemic and phonological awareness approach as the foundation for their model of reading intervention.  This approach is utilized as part of a Tier 3 (Intensive) RTI implemented through the programs discussed last month.  Arguably, what needs to come next is the true debate. 

For quite some time, Reading Recovery has remained a 1:1 program and thereby utilized as a Tier 3 RTI reading intervention.  Reading Recovery marketers are potentially being deceptive if stating nothing more is ever needed. Reading Recovery founder Marie Clay (2005) was clear there should be two years of monitoring and additional support following a Grade 1 student’s successful completion of the Reading Recovery program (Tier 3). 

Remove the students that were not provided any support beyond Reading Recovery during Grade 1 from the APM (2022) study and the real problem will be evident:  Neglect of the need to effectively monitor and adjust instruction or interventions based on subsequent results!  Many of the Tier 3 RTI reading programs discussed last month have evolved to offer further structured and systemic support that can be delivered as Tier 2 and Tier 1 (universal) practice.  The need for continued evolution will ideally soon include Reading Recovery. 

As noted last month, the Remediation Plus System's Teacher Training White Paper (2017) helps teachers and school administrators understand its reading intervention training and curriculum. Crucially, the system provides opportunities to become expert teachers of reading and remediation. By seeking to ensure every teacher is proficient to address reading deficits, the system's replicable lesson plans offer an invaluable opportunity to use a very strategic approach to providing interventions. Tier 2 RTI should always be a structured literacy intervention that builds upon a systemic P-3 curriculum of fluent reading, comprehension, writing, and thinking skills.

The benefit of programs such as the Remediation Plus System, is it was created to address the need for systemic professional development rather than only creating a specialized group trained in delivering Tier 3 interventions.   Having HIGHLY Proficient PK-Grade 3 teachers delivering Tier 1 & 2 reading, comprehension, and writing skills should be part of every district’s strategic goal.  

The correlate of frequent monitoring and subsequent adjustment drives the core principles for effectively implementing RTI.  Therefore, the ability to collect data, evaluate results, and be an honest consumer of the resulting data promotes sustained success.  Teacher proficiency with data must therefore be embraced as an essential professional competency

                Frequent monitoring of student progress, and adjusting instruction or interventions based on results is a correlate of continuous school improvement within Effective Schools Research.  This correlate requires teacher competency in ethically and reliably collecting data, evaluating results, and effectively consuming the data.  Teacher bias becomes possible when teachers identify and prescribe an intervention.  They then may have difficulty accepting the need to adjust when the prescribed intervention proves ineffective. A teacher may erroneously perceive the intervention’s failure as a personal failure of his or her initial prescription.  Thus, defensiveness rather than professional awareness delays any necessary adjustment.  For this reason, teacher preparation programs as well as districts or schools need to institutionalize the following six ideas for successful development of an effective RTI system:

1. Encourage participation by key stakeholders during planning and implementation.
2. Elicit strong administrative support in staff development, instructional integrity, and data collection.
3. Provide in-depth staff development with mentoring, modeling, and coaching.
4. Begin follow-up trainings at the beginning of each school year.
5. Distribute a manual outlining procedures and materials.
6. Build Problem Solving Models such as RTI into school schedules and the student improvement process (Lau, Sieler, Muyskens, et al, 2006).

Crucially, the field of education will benefit from embracing a whole child approach to learning, teaching, and community engagement grounded in the belief that “each child, in each school, in each of our communities deserves to be healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged” (ASCD, 2018).  Advocates of these fundamental tenets have long considered them essential for ensuring students become college-, career-, and citizenship-ready, which is a desired outcome of Effective Schools Research.

In order to effectively lead a school using a whole child approach to education, an educational leader needs to be “visionary; effective instructional leaders; active learners; and influencers within their staff and the community” (ASCD, 2018).  As can be expected, the Whole Child Approach to education promotes policies and practices aligned to support the whole child.  This requires a change in how adults currently work together to educate children. 

As an advocate for Invitational Education Theory and Practices, I whole-heartedly believe student success is possible whenever educators utilize an intentionally caring, optimistic, respectful, and trusting (I-CORT) mindset. Through intentional invitations for vibrant discussions and active interactions, an I-CORT-driven educator systemically addresses institutional needs through an inventory of the people. places, policies, programs, and processes (5-Ps) that influence the potential for success. This intentional desire promotes collaboration,  exhibits critical, higher order thinking skills (HOTS), and analyzes accessible, reliable data.  Are you an I-CORT-driven educator embracing diverse approaches, promoting cooperative learning, exhibiting high expectations, utilizing HOTS, and analyzing data to monitor and adjust whenever needed?

Remember: A goal without a plan is just a wish. An ICORT-driven educator plans for success!  Strengthen your intervention plans and RTI systems through the active pursuit for increased awareness, elevated knowledge, and willingness to make better possible.

 

 

To cite:

Anderson, C.J. (April 30, 2022) What is needed to supplement tier 3 reading intervention? [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/

 

References; 

ASCD (2018) The Whole Child Approach. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/whole-child.aspx

Big Ideas in Beginning Reading (2009) University of Oregon Center on Teaching and Learning

Retrieved from:  http://reading.uoregon.edu/resources/bibr_pa_concepts.pdf

 

Brown, R. (2021). Understanding dyslexia. A whitepaper published by for Illuminate Education

 

Kame'enui, E. J., Simmons, D. C., Baker, S., Chard, D. J., Dickson, S. V., Gunn, B., Smith, S. B.,

Sprick, M., & Lin, S. J. (1997). Effective strategies for teaching beginning reading. In E. J.

Kame'enui, & D. W. Carnine (Eds.), Effective Teaching Strategies That Accommodate

Diverse Learners. Merrill.

 

Lezotte, L. W. (1991) Correlates of Effective Schools: The First and Second Generation.

            Retrieved from: http://www.effectiveschools.com/images/stories/escorrelates.pdf

 

Lezotte, L. W. & Snyder, K. M. (2011). What effective schools do: Re-envisioning the

correlates. Solution Tree Press.

 

Lyon, G. R. (1995). Toward a definition of dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 45, 3-27.

 

Moats, L. C. (1999). Teaching reading is rocket science: What expert teachers of reading

should know and be able to do. American Federation of Teachers.

 

National Reading Panel (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of

the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction

[online]. Retrieved from: http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/smallbook.htm.

 

Remediation Plus teacher training white paper (2017) retrieved from https://issuu.com/remediationplus/docs/r__teacher_training_white_paper

 

Yopp, H. K. (1992). Developing Phonemic Awareness in Young Children. Reading Teacher,

45(9), 696-703.