When Most Students Need Reading Interventions: A Q&A on the Tier 1.5 Approach

Educators have known for decades that some students need reading interventions to become strong readers (Gersten et al., 2008). However, when 70–80% of students need reading interventions, the typical multi-tiered systems of supports in reading (MTSS-R) may break down. Schools can quickly run out of time and staff capacity, even with protected universal instruction, small-group support, progress monitoring, and tutoring.

MTSS-R gives schools a structure for organizing literacy instruction and interventions. It is a comprehensive, integrated system of reading instruction and intervention, supported by data use, professional learning and coaching, leadership, and family-school partnership (National Center on Improving Literacy, n.d.). In the MTSS-R model, Tier 1, or universal instruction, is intended to meet the needs of 80% or more students.

The triangle figure below shows the typical MTSS structure. Tier 1 is the broad base because universal instruction serves all students. Much smaller groups are intended to receive Tier 2 targeted interventions and Tier 3 intensive interventions.

However, some schools see a very different distribution of student need in their screening data. A majority of students may be scoring below benchmark and require additional support.

As the evaluator of Comprehensive Literacy State Development grants in three states, I have heard educators describe the strain of this situation. Schools can maximize reading time, offer before- and after-school tutoring, and engage families in literacy activities at home, and teachers can still face more needs than the schedule can absorb.

Emily Janak, a literacy coach and instructional support specialist in Wagner, South Dakota, refers to this situation as a “flipped triangle.”

This summer, at South Dakota’s Elevate, Educate, Empower: Moving Literacy Forward Across South Dakota conference, Emily described how her previous school used a brief, classwide “Tier 1.5” block when more than 50% of students shared the same underlying reading skill gap. The school protected grade-level Tier 1 instruction, taught the missing prerequisite skill to the larger group, monitored progress weekly, and continued more intensive support for students who needed it.

Emily describes Tier 1.5 as a classwide bridge within MTSS-R when the percentage of students needing intervention is too high for the traditional system to be adequate. In the conversation below, Emily and I explore how her team used data to decide when that bridge was needed, how they found time and materials to implement it, what they learned, and what school leaders should watch for if trying this approach.

Caitlin Scott: How did you get into literacy work, and what shaped your approach to intervention?

Emily Janak:

I didn’t come into literacy in the traditional realm. I started as a Spanish educator and worked mainly with high school kids who were taking Spanish as an elective. School came easy for them. But when you move to smaller districts, Spanish isn’t always an employable area. So I added a master’s in literacy, and from there started to learn more about literacy at the middle school and high school level.

We live in incredibly rural South Dakota, and we moved to a new district where I was an ELA [English language arts] teacher, which opened another door: special education. Through getting my certification in special education, I learned about reading science and how brains worked. It made me analyze everything I had done as a middle school and high school ELA teacher, and it sparked a renewed interest: if I could get my students with disabilities, especially reading disabilities, reading, why couldn’t kids in general education do it as well? So that was how I got into the literacy realm.

Once I got there, I absorbed every professional development that came my way, every opportunity to learn, because students of all backgrounds deserve the ability to read. I started as an elementary special education teacher. After COVID, ESSER [Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief] funds allowed the school to open an interventionist role, and that role got me more into instructional coaching. I saw the impact; as a teacher, I can impact my own students, but if I can impact educators, then my impact gets broader and broader. I came to Wagner School District as a special education teacher, but my heart’s always in literacy. Now I’m a literacy coach and an instructional support specialist with special education.

CS: What experiences led you to start thinking beyond the usual model of providing intervention in a whole group format?

EJ:

When you start doing [MTSS-R] as a school that hasn’t done it before, you’re following the handbook to a T. It tells you that if a student is below benchmark, they need intervention. So that’s what we would do. At my first school, fewer than 50% of our students were on track. We were a Title I school, but we didn’t have a high ELL [English language learner] population. We were pretty much a typical South Dakota school. I was the interventionist. We had paraprofessionals, but it was a K–5 school with one interventionist and 50% of the students were identified as needing an intervention. We did it to the best of our ability, and students were out of the classroom more than they were in.

I started to question that. We modified our Tier 1 instruction and tried to give the best instruction possible to all our kids, but we still had a high number of students not on track. We started asking what made the most sense. Did it make sense to pull out all the students who qualified for Tier 2, then all the students who needed Tier 3 and special education services? There wasn’t enough time in the day.

We started talking about supports within the traditional MTSS-R model and called it the missing piece. If the majority of our first graders came in not knowing all their letter names and sounds, we would do the first-grade curriculum with fidelity, but the first-grade curriculum wasn’t teaching letter names and sounds anymore. So we weren’t making gains, even if we were doubling down on Tier 1 grade-level instruction. Was that fair to the half who did know their letter names and sounds and needed grade-level content? That’s where the idea of Tier 1.5 came in.

CS: What does “Tier 1.5” mean in your system, and when do you use it?

EJ:

Tier 1.5 was the bridge between our grade-level curriculum (our Tier 1 curriculum) and what the majority of students need if they’re not on track. It helped refine our process because we got really good at pinpointing need instead of just saying our kids weren’t on track or using strategies that had worked with some kids, we tailored what we did to our data. We got really good at being student-centered and data-driven.

We used data and multiple data sources to pinpoint where our students’ gaps or skill areas were, target that area, and progress monitor all our kids until they got proficient. Our threshold was 75% proficient. If over 50% of our students were not on track, we gave a classwide intervention until 75% were on track. The students who still weren’t there got targeted small-group or pull-out intervention. That also helped us better pinpoint which students actually needed small-group interventions and which ones just needed the learning.

CS: When many students need the same support, what does that tell you about the core curriculum?

EJ:

We found in both schools that our curricula didn’t necessarily prepare students the way we thought they would. We were following the curricula, but we were unintentionally creating gaps, and students would go from grade to grade with gaps in learning. It started with the COVID-era kids, but then we saw the same patterns across years. We talked about how, if you have to do Tier 1.5 interventions, you need to check the core curriculum in that grade and the grade below and see where, across the big five,* the curriculum may not be meeting students’ needs.

Preschool is not mandatory in South Dakota. That’s another challenge. If you have students coming into kindergarten who went to preschool alongside students who didn’t, it becomes a numbers game. If you have a lot of students who need the same support, then you probably need some Tier 1.5 work.

*The “big five” refers to the five major components of evidence-based reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension (National Reading Panel, n.d.).

CS: How do you choose materials for a classwide Tier 1.5 block?

EJ:

We do a combination. The first thing we do is look within our own curriculum and grade band to see if it’s there or in the additional resources. If it’s not there, we look at the grade below or grades below. We always look in the core first because it’s intended for whole-group instruction. Then we look at any approved Tier 2 resources we already have. After that, our instructional specialists and curriculum directors look for open-access materials. There are a lot of really good open-access materials that are free for teachers and help meet those needs.

For example, at Wagner, over 50% of our students struggle with informational text. We’re looking for vetted, research-backed materials that are made for whole-class use, so they’re easy for teachers to implement. We don’t want it to be so cumbersome that it seems like one more thing.

CS: Where does the time come from?

EJ:

It really depends on the grade because we identify our essential areas of learning per grade, and those stick to our timeline. If first grade has a 30-minute phonics block, we don’t pull from that 30-minute block. We try to find about 15 minutes a day for Tier 1.5. We might pull 5 to 10 minutes from comprehension, vocabulary, or writing until we get that new learning in. At first, my teachers bucked that idea, but once we solidified what students were missing, we could go back into those areas and move faster because our students had more skills.

We also look at transition times. If there are places where we transition slowly, we try to firm those up. Our goal is at least 15 minutes a day, if not 20, for that Tier 1.5 block.

CS: How long do you run the classwide Tier 1.5 support, and how do you monitor progress?

EJ:

We do it for six weeks because we follow the “four-point decision rule” that we have to have six data points, and we look at the last four. That’s how our school’s decision rules work in terms of data, so we follow that protocol for Tier 1.5 as well. We progress monitor weekly.

CS: What results did you see in your previous school?

EJ:

In the middle of the second year, we started Tier 1.5. Within about a year and a half of adding Tier 1.5, we were up to over 80% of our kids on track.

At Wagner, we’ve got this in the works, and we have similar starting data to what I had at my previous school. I’m really interested to see how it’ll work. Wagner is about double the size of the previous school. We have four teachers per grade level, so that adds its own challenges.

CS: What cautions would you give schools trying this approach?

EJ:

The caution is that there are kids who still need more support than Tier 1.5. You can’t put everything in Tier 1.5. There are students who still need more, and you can provide that on top of Tier 1.5. You don’t have to wait until Tier 1.5 is done to meet those students’ needs.

The other thing is that it only works if you can successfully pinpoint the skill area of need. I can think of a fourth-grade class that qualified for Tier 1.5 because their general comprehension wasn’t great. The teacher said, “Okay, let’s give a comprehension intervention.” But it turned out this group of students was lacking the ability to decode multisyllabic words. If we had just looked at the overall data and given an intervention where we saw the deficit, we never would have realized the specific deficit that over half the kids had. It’s only going to work if you can determine the most basic area of need. Otherwise, you’re just putting in more time, and you probably won’t see big results.

CS: How does this show up with older students?

EJ:

One thing I found is that in middle school, the older students get, the more teachers assume kids can pull the words off the page. In both schools, we weren’t teaching morphology or multisyllabic words past second grade. Our kids had okay enough fluency to fall under the radar on oral reading fluency, but when you looked at multisyllabic words, you could see a deficit. Making adolescent teachers aware that phonics is necessary even at that age was a hard shift. I was a middle school ELA teacher who sat in special education meetings and thought, “If my students can’t read the words on the page, I’m going to teach them compensation strategies.” Now I know how wrong I was.

At Wagner, where I work primarily with middle school, we’re going to implement reciprocal teaching strategies. We have a lot of low comprehenders who are okay in fluency and other areas. I’m kind of a data nerd, and I want to see what a structured comprehension approach can do for students. I’ve got a couple of teachers on board, so I need to get a couple more.

CS: If more than half a class is below benchmark, what should teachers and leaders do first?

EJ:

My biggest thing is: look for the why. Why do they have that deficit, and what is the deficit? We can’t be surface level with this. We have to know why, or whatever we do is like a coin flip. If we can see the reason students aren’t where they’re supposed to be, we have a chance to intervene and succeed.

What leaders can take from this approach

Emily’s results are local implementation outcomes from one prior school. Her experience points to a practical leadership move when large numbers of students share the same reading gap: treat the pattern as system data. Teams can examine the core curriculum and sequence, identify the shared skill deficit, provide a brief classwide boost through Tier 1.5, and keep targeted and intensive interventions running for students who need more. That work depends on clear decision rules, usable materials, weekly progress data, and coaching that helps teachers diagnose the actual barrier to reading.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. This blog is for educational and informational purposes only and does not necessarily represent a Marzano Research endorsement of any product or program.

Sources

National Reading Panel. (n.d.). Report of the National Reading Panel. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/findings

Gersten, R., Compton, D., Connor, C. M., Dimino, J., Santoro, L., Linan-Thompson, S., & Tilly, W. D. (2008). Assisting students struggling with reading: Response to Intervention and multi-tier intervention for reading in the primary grades. A practice guide. (NCEE 2009-4045). U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/WWC/PracticeGuide/3