Tier 1 Interventions

1. Ensure Core Curriculum (Common Core Georgia Performance Standards) is in place.

2. Ensure the classroom is a safe, positive learning environment, and behavioral expectations are clearly communicated and taught to students.

3. Utilize formative assessments to monitor individual student growth.

4. The teacher completes additional diagnostic assessment(s), to determine specific skill needs and provides differentiated instruction to address these needs.

5. If there are students not making progress in academics or behavior, the teacher completes Tier 1 Student Information Form (for each student) and gives it to his/her grade-level/department chairperson/Team Leader. Parent contact is made.

6. Grade level/Department Team discusses information, checks on differentiated instruction and effective practice in response to observed difficulties of students.

7. The team suggests interventions and differentiation of instructional practices for the teacher to try in the general classroom. Teacher takes the suggestions back to the classroom to implement. Progress monitoring is completed every 2 weeks.

8. If after at least 8 weeks of following suggestions from the grade-level or department instructional team, the teacher continues to have concerns about student progress; the teacher initiates a meeting with the RTI Coordinator in the building. At that meeting, the group decides if the student remains at Tier 1. If the student continues at Tier 1, additional recommendations are made to address the student’s needs. If the decision is to move to Tier 2, the grade-level team refers the student to the Response to Intervention (RTI) Team and the parents are contacted.

9. Complete Intervention Fidelity Checklist.

Students take over the teacher role as they lead small-group discussions about what they've read to help improve reading comprehension and social skills.

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This is a small group approach to help students who struggle with reading comprehension.

This approach combines two main strategies:

1. literature-related activities (partner reading, treasure hunts, word mastery, story retelling, story related writing, and quizzes),
2. direct instruction in reading comprehension strategies (identifying main ideas and themes, drawing conclusions, making predictions, and understanding figurative language).

Students work in teams of equal ability and follow a cycle of teacher instruction, team practice, independent practice, peer assessment, and individual assessment.

This strategy helps students retain more instructional content by incorporating brief Peer-Guided Pause sessions.

1. Students are grouped into pairs.
2. Teacher prompts students to work together for 4 minutes.
3. Students are given a worksheet that contains one or more correctly completed word or number problem; this sheet can also include other similar problems that students can work on together.
4. Student pairs should give each other feedback, ensure they understand the lesson's concepts, work together, and check their answers.
5. Teachers may choose to collect student work to track student understanding.

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The following strategies combine cognitive and metacognitive elements to help students solve math word problems.

Cognitive Strategy

1. Students read the problem carefully, noting and attempting to clear up any areas of uncertainty or confusion (e.g., unknown vocabulary words).
2. Students restate the problem in their own words.
3. Students create a drawing of the problem, creating a visual representation of the word problem.
4. Students decide on the best way to solve the problem and develop a plan to do so.
5. Students estimate or predict what the answer to the problem might be by computing an approximation of the answer or rounding.
6. Students follow the plan developed earlier to compute the actual answer to the problem.
7. Student methodically check the calculations for each step of the problem.

For each of the above cognitive steps above, the student goes through the following meta-cognitive steps:

1. SAY: Students self-instruct by saying the purpose of the step.
2. ASK: Students self-question by asking what they intent to do to complete the step.
3. CHECK: Students conclude the step by checking that the step was completed successfully.

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This cooperative learning technique helps build reading comprehension and social skills by encouraging students to become the “expert" on a topic, and teach it to others.

1. Choose a reading selection that has a variety of parts. The number of sections corresponds to the number of students in each group.
2. Give the entire selection to the whole class. Engage students in a discussion that activates background knowledge.
3. Divide students into home groups. If the reading selection has four section then there will need to be four home groups with four students in each group.
4. Students count off 1, 2, 3, and 4 and form expert groups with their like numbered peers (e.g., all 1s form a group, all 2s, etc.). There will now be four expert groups.
5. Each expert group is responsible for reading their section of the total reading selection.
6. Give the expert groups a set amount of time to read and discuss their section. The expert group decides the most important parts of their section and what they will share out to their home groups.
7. Students return to their home groups. Each student (expert) takes a turn teaching the rest of the group their section of the reading.
8. You may follow this activity with a whole-group discussion or a writing activity about the whole reading selection.

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