6 Impactful Strategies for Your Intervention Program

In this article, you will find take-away practical and easily applicable strategies that your entire school can use to help close the learning gaps sustained by students over the last few years. These strategies can be applied to school-wide initiatives. Plus, watch an on-demand webinar to learn more strategies for your intervention program. 

What are intervention programs?

Intervention program is a term that is found in schools and districts across the United States. They are designed to identify gaps in learning and close the achievement gaps of students from grade level to grade level.

During my time in the classroom, I was able to experience and be a part of such programs. While in my role as a district administrator, I planned and helped the implementation of school-wide intervention programs as well. My goal is to share what is important about these programs. 

School-wide strategies to support intervention programs involve the entire school campus and are consistent across grade levels, teachers, teacher assistants, licensed staff, classified staff, parent volunteers, student volunteers, guest speakers. I think you understand where I am going. 

Strategy #1: Learn from Each Other

“High-school could use a little middle school, middle school could use a little elementary school, 3–5 could learn from K–2, K–2 could use a dash of 3–5.” As an educator, you have probably heard at least one of these sayings uttered in a school improvement team meeting or a grade-level meeting. You may have been the individual to speak these words. If you have ever spoken any of these phrases or agreed with one of them, then you and I have a lot in common already. All of these phrases are telling us that we should take what each grade-span or grade-level does wonderfully and make that the norm for the entire campus. 

Strategy #2: Go Beyond Benchmarks

Let us begin with identifying gaps in learning. Every school or school system that I have visited in the U.S. has a form of beginning-, middle-, and end-of-year benchmarks or assessments.

Obviously, the beginning of the year benchmark is a starting point for identifying learning loss, but it should not be the only or the final way to assess student ability. The good news is, as a school campus, you probably do not need to worry about designing this type of assessment, as it is usually provided by your administrator.

This allows you to focus on other areas/opportunities to further dig into what it is that your students are missing when it comes to content area instruction, especially in literacy and mathematics. 

Strategy #3: Be Inspired by K–2 Teachers 

K–2 teachers incorporate small-group instruction into nearly every content area. They monitor their students’ progress throughout a lesson. They conference with their students one-on-one. Consider making these practices a part of instruction and planning across every grade level. 

Small-group Instruction

A teacher can glean insight about a student’s instructional gaps during small-group instruction. The instruction that takes place in this setting is not only powerful, but also very revealing. In my years, I have never once taught, observed, or heard of a student that would not tell a teacher what they didn’t understand or did not know in a small group of their peers, a group where they felt comfortable and heard. 

Progress Monitoring

Another strategy that has proven to reveal instructional gaps is providing progress monitoring opportunities in a timely, unhurried manner. This is important as it allows the natural progression of the gradual release of responsibility model to flourish in the classroom. 

One-on-One Student Conferences

The last identification strategy to consider is taking a few minutes out of the instructional day to have a one-on-one conference with student(s) that you may suspect did not give you all the formative assessment data you needed. It is important to note that during this time you are not asking leading or “yes/no” questions but open-ended questions that get to the root of possible instructional gaps or learning loss.

In the second school where I was an educator, the art, music, and physical education teaching staff, as well as the media coordinator, remediation team, and teacher assistants assisted classroom teachers in all three of the areas above. This was truly a wonderful experience to be a part of, as it showed me the power and success of a cohesive school unit and truly represented the term “school-wide”. 

Strategy #4: Utilize High-Yield Instruction

Most people that are involved in education understand how precious time is. So, it then becomes a priority of every teacher and administrator to get the most “bang for our buck” with high-yield instruction.

Once school-wide strategies are in place to identify learning gaps, how do we gain more time in our academic year to bridge those gaps in learning? This is most definitely where the nine high-yield strategies for improving instruction and student achievement come into play. Nine such strategies are

• Identifying Similarities and Differences
• Summarizing and Note Taking
• Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
• Practice
• Nonlinguistic Representations of Learning
• Cooperative Learning
• Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
• Generating and Testing Hypotheses and Questions
• Advanced Organizers

As a district administrator in curriculum and instruction, if I could not find evidence of all nine high-yield instructional strategies in each lesson plan of a loss prevention program, I moved on from that resource.

My teachers did not have the planning time to develop these activities on their own. I spent most of my tenure in my past school district doing this draining work for them.  I knew, though, that these strategies are where I would get the most “bang for my buck” as far as instructional time in an academic year was concerned. I also knew that these high-yield strategies were applicable to any content area and that was powerful as well.

Strategy #5: Implement School-Wide Vocabulary Strategies 

Another school-wide learning loss reversal strategy that I want to share with revolves around a school-wide vocabulary initiative. In addition to word walls or word of the day that are often found in many classrooms, a grade level specific pacing to teach roots and affixes is something that can be easily planned and carried out. 

To illustrate this concept, look below at a couple of examples of grade-level breakdowns that I implemented in elementary schools.

Prefix: a word part added to the beginning of a root or base word to create a new meaning,

Suffix: a letter or a group of letters added to the end of a root or base word to change its meaning,

The root:  the form of a word after all affixes are removed. (Generally, prefixes and suffixes change the meanings of roots, but it is usually the suffix that denotes the part of speech.)

If you think about using a grade-level breakdown of roots and affixes as a school-wide initiative, what is powerful is the number of word building skills that each student carries to the next grade level.

These roots and affixes can also be used across content areas within grade-level planning to increase literacy skills. For example 

The power of this example demonstrates using a vocabulary initiative school-wide but also across content areas in a grade level to help reverse the learning loss of literacy skills within our students. Whether your grade levels are self-contained or departmentalized, I believe this is a great example of working smarter and not harder.

Strategy 6: Try “The Every Initiative” 

A question that I am asked often is “what can I do to make sure that students are understanding what they are reading in language arts and math?” This is a fair and often important question.

When working with districts and administrators, I like to start with what I have named “The Every Initiative.” The Every Initiative, works like this

• My students will ___________________ with every text. (Reading)
• My students will ___________________ with every problem. (Mathematics)
• My students will ___________________ every summer.

The first thing you should notice is that these are statements, not questions. These are facts, an initiative, almost a mission statement.

Classroom teachers write learning objectives in a similar way, so I have always thought it beneficial to plan for learning loss in this fashion as well.

Since this article is about how to make your intervention programs impactful, look at “The Every Initiative” as being carried out the same way in every grade level.  Let me share with you an example of what this looks like at a school level.

My students will _______________________ with every text.

To help promote and bolster comprehension of literature it is important to reinforce that reading comprehension takes place in every content area. As a matter of fact, it seems like almost overnight, our end-of-grade tests in science, social studies, and mathematics are now reading comprehension tests as well.

Take a 30,000-foot view of your school and focus now on what is an overarching reading skill issue that most students in your school have? Hint: Poll the teachers!.

Once you have identified that reading comprehension deficit, construct a strategy or activity that you want to teach every student to do with every text they encounter. Below is an example from one of the last elementary schools I worked with in 2021. Additionally, we specified what will be completed with every informational text and every piece of literature.

Informational Text

The above example is essentially what every student would answer in grades K–5 after reading an informational text in reading, mathematics, science, or social studies. There is a small difference in grades 3–5 that makes a very large impact with informational texts and this is being able to identify the structure of how an informational text is written.

Literature

The above example shows what every student would answer in grades K–5 after reading fictional texts. The overarching literacy skill deficit in this school was that many students did not understand story structure and had difficulty retelling with important information. The academic vocabulary also shifted a bit based on the state reading standards between K–2 to 3–5.

Another key point to make with this strategy is that when teaching this strategy across multiple years and multiple grade levels, we are ultimately teaching students to think this way automatically when not in the classroom. This pertains to homework, reading for entertainment, bedtime reading, and even reading during the summer.