Hi Emily,
In intervention, educators provide additional support to students who need it, with the goal of helping them make accelerated progress and catch up to their peers rather than falling further and further behind each year. That’s the goal, but your question brings to light that this sort of growth doesn’t magically happen even when a student is in intervention. When a student isn’t responding, you (hopefully with the support of a problem-solving team) will want to use data, or start collecting data, that will help you decide on next steps for this student.
In my experience, there are two lenses through which to analyze the next steps: the system lens and the student lens. Let’s talk about the system first. System-level analysis is an important, but in my opinion, often overlooked place to begin problem-solving. The big question to frame this work around is, “How is the group of students in the intervention responding to instruction?” When you look at group data, you might discover that everyone (or most other students) in the intervention is not making the progress you’d expect and that it’s not an isolated problem. Your team will want to try to get to the root of why. Is the intervention using evidence-based practices appropriate for the group of students? Is something getting in the way of intervention delivery? For example, is the intervention delivered in a room next to the cafeteria during one of the lunch periods and it’s loud and distracting for students, or are inclement weather school delays causing the morning intervention to be frequently interrupted? Watching a few intervention sessions or conducting a fidelity check may be a helpful way to figure out what might be going on. Once your team has a hypothesis, you can refine or alter the intervention for the whole group based on this information. Usually, you will either need to better align the intervention to students’ needs (i.e., provide targeted instruction) or provide more support (i.e., intensify the intervention). I can't offer you specific advice without more information, but some common changes to the intervention at the group level that might help are things like allocating more of the lesson time to reading practice, using more frequent checks for understanding and feedback, changing when the intervention is provided, or sometimes using a different intervention program or focus.
Another thing that you might find when you look at group data is that one or two students in the group are not making adequate progress, but everyone else is. In this case, the team has a different problem to solve. This time, rather than looking at the intervention as a whole, the team asks, “Why isn’t the intervention working for this student?” It’s important to consider both how the intervention is delivered (e.g., Does that student have the same attendance and engagement in the intervention as other students?) and the content of the intervention (e.g., Do the lessons target the student's current skill profile?) to determine the reason(s) for the student’s lack of response. Once you determine a reason, you can decide on next steps. Again, these decisions must be made using individualized student data. I can’t offer you a recommendation for your specific student, but I’ll offer a few ideas for common changes. You might decrease the size of the student’s group, increase the duration or frequency of the intervention, or include more guided practice with explicit modeling. It may also be appropriate to begin a Tier 3 intervention or consider a special education referral.
There are a few other important tips I’d like to share. You probably know that intervention is most effective when it begins early. This is why students should receive intervention as soon as they start to show risks of learning difficulties. One of the structures you’ll want to make sure you have in place (if you don’t already) is a way to screen students, ensuring you identify needs and provide extra support as soon as possible. It’s entirely possible the student in question was identified early in their school career. If that’s true, kudos to everyone involved who made that happen! If not, you obviously can’t support this student earlier, but you might learn from a possible pattern of late identification and realize there may be other students who would benefit from early intervention. Once you’ve found students who need support, the best way to provide intervention is using a multi-level prevention system (i.e., the student is in Tier 2 and/or Tier 3 intervention and receives this support in addition to strong Tier 1 instruction), just like you mentioned. From there, you’ll want to follow data guidelines (suggestions are usually found in the progress monitoring test’s technical manual) to determine a frequency for reviewing progress. You want to be able to confidently conclude that the student has been in intervention long enough to determine whether the intervention is effective, while also making sure the student isn’t languishing in an intervention that isn't helping them make accelerated progress towards their goal. Again, this is a systematic way to make sure students get what they need.
What I’ve shared is different from following a set of lock-step rules that I sometimes see in schools that sound something like: “Deliver an intervention program, analyze the results after X weeks. If the student is not responding, pick a new program. Repeat. If still no progress, move to Tier 3.” Instead, the goal is to make changes based on what the data are telling you about the student and the intervention, continue monitoring progress, and use the student’s response to decide what comes next.
I hope this information helps provide some clarity for you and your team to determine the best path forward for your student!
