Tier II Example

Mr. McGruder is a veteran teacher in an urban school serving a largely multicultural population. For a six-weeks unit on civil rights, he selected a poetic, repetitious text for fluency practice. Mr. McGruder introduced the students to the poem during a read-aloud, engaged the students in a thoughtful discussion about the elements of the poem, and explicitly taught the class why the poet selected certain words for the text. He also had all of the students participate in repeated readings, a common research-based strategy for developing fluency.

Amy is one of a four students who did not meet key benchmarks in fluency in the class-wide screening and struggled when asked to read the poem aloud when she met with Mr. McGruder during small group time. Amy also struggles when given passages to read independently and historically, she has performed poorly on assignments and state assessments.

When listening to Amy read, Mr. McGruder noticed that she takes long pauses when she approaches unfamiliar words and suspects that her fluency may be impacted by her weak decoding skills. He takes the data to the content team at his campus prior to developing an intervention plan for Amy.

The team reviewed the data, ruled out language and engagement as possible areas of concern, and narrowed the focus of Amy's troubles to the academics pillar. The team agreed that Amy may have decoding issues and suggested that Mr. McGruder continue to provide small group instruction with Amy. Together, they developed an intervention plan that focused on word attack strategies to help Amy sound out words, locate vowels within a syllable, and identify known affixes within words.