Supporting Struggling Students Through Interventions

Five Steps to Developing a Proactive Intervention Plan

• Identify mastery thresholds• Establish red flags• Develop formative assessments• Select appropriate

interventions• Monitor your plan

Case Study• Read the following case study.• Assuming that Principal Mathers has no additional resources to hire after-school tutors, how can he best address this problem.

Here’s How• Read how Principal Mathers and his

school are confronting the question.• Discuss how this aligns with your

decision to deal with the issue.

What is Effective Support?Effective Support is….• Ongoing• Proactive• Targeted• Accelerative• Learning-focused• Monitored• Managed by a teacher

as advocate

Effective Support is Not..• As Needed• Reactive• Generalized• Remedial• Behavior-focused• Random• Imposed by a teacher

as adversary

Rules for Interventions• Interventions should be

seamless and unobtrusive.• Interventions should be

designed to get students quickly back on track.• Interventions should be

systematic.

Rules continued• Interventions should be

temporary.• Interventions should be minimal.• Interventions should be specific.• Interventions should not be

labor intensive

Monitor and Gradually Remove Your Supports

• Use formative assessments to determine whether supports are working.

• Decrease the amount of support you provide for students over time.

• Increase the number of steps students must complete on their own.

• Decrease the frequency of Support.

Instructional Intervention Strategies Handouts on Duplin Website

• Go to Departments next to RttT next to Common Core Day February 18th

• The packet contains suggested interventions teachers can use to support struggling students.

• The key is determining when a student is beginning to go into a destructive struggle and to have an intervention plan in place to provide them with immediate support.

Planning Interventions• Interventions should be a part of the

lesson planning process.• Assess what you are teaching and

decide what corrective actions will help get my students back on track.

• Be proactive and have these ready to implement the minute a student starts a destructive struggle.

Supporting Students After Instruction

Why do students continue to struggle?

Work in groups of four to develop and categorize a list of possible reasons for the following:Even after you have supported students prior to the lesson, provided them with targeted intervention during the lesson, you still have a handful of students who do not understand the concepts or still cannot demonstrate mastery of the required skills.

Categorize your list Academic use remediation alone

Remediation and behavior management

What is Remediation?• Acceleration was offered before

students started the unit of study.• Intervention was offered during the

instruction.• Remediation is an opportunity to

provide additional support to those students who still do not understand key concepts in spite of attempts to support them.

Who do You Remediate?• Constantly analyze formative data to

determine students with deficits in their learning.

• Determine all students close to mastery.

• Determine students who need intensive remediation.

• Students who struggle with context(test structure) rather than content.

Error Analysis• Have student review first

assessments to analyze errors.• Determine and present probable

causes of error.• Determine how to prevent this error

in the future.• Students should present an error

analysis before they can retest.

Reteach• Teach concepts the students don’t

understand a different way.• Focus on only the key concepts and skills

students need to know.• Re-teaching should occur shortly after a

students’ assessment shows they did not understand much of the material.

• Teaching should be different than regular instruction.

• Should not create additional work for students.

Tutoring• Can use teacher or peer tutoring or

both.• Should help students develop

specific skills.• Should target the learning task with

which they are struggling.• Should be temporary.• Electronic or on-line tutorials can be

used.

Additional Practice• Not drill and kill!• Practice should focus on helping

students develop fluency and proficiency.

• Practice should be distributed over a period of time. Use several sessions.

• Should be meaningful• Should be short• Should have built in feedback.

Organization and Study Habits

• If poor performance is due to poor learning habits, the remediation may need to focus on this.

• Work on learning strategies• Work on organization of notebooks, note-

taking strategies.• Teach them how to use graphic organizers.• Allow them to retake the assessment after

they have applied these new strategies.

Alternative Instructional Strategies

• Match students best learning style.• Hands-on verses lecture.• Working with a partner or small group.• Breaking information down into small

learning targets and teaching small chunks at a time.

• Remediation is not simply going over the material more slowly. Its teaching concepts a different way.

Reassessing• After providing the corrective action.• Reassess to improve learning not

grades.• Reassess only when it helps students

learn information they need to move on.

• Reassess in a new or different format, as applicable.

• Reassess as close to the original assessment as possible.