A Framework for Effective Literacy Support in Middle School

In my work supporting middle schools in implementing effective Mult-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), it’s not unusual for the team meetings that I sit in on to become tense.

Administrators arrive with concerns about the progress of a student who has recently exited out of pullout Tier 3 support and is now receiving small group Tier 2 instruction during a general English language arts (ELA) instructional block. The expectation is that the student’s teachers will be able to explain persistent gaps, but the teachers don’t have relevant data for the student, and they’re unclear about their role in providing specific literacy support within small group instruction.

“Isn’t this why students get pulled out for interventions?” they ask. “I’m an ELA teacher, not a reading specialist.” In the worst cases, the meeting concludes without next steps for the student.

Many schools I work with have administration teams that can place students in appropriately tiered 2 and 3 interventions based on student achievement data. But administrators in many other schools, whose teachers often have limited background knowledge in literacy, do not know which data platforms should be used to answer which questions within a tiered system of literacy supports.

For that reason, much of my current work involves three things: helping administrators understand how specific data and assessment platforms can help diagnose student literacy needs, guiding teachers in providing instructional support, and assisting teams in monitoring decisions based on intervention outcomes. These three elements are crucial to the goal: helping students transition out of literacy support and reach appropriate grade-level reading benchmarks.

Designing a Data-Informed Framework of Support

There is a lot of technology available to help schools systematize their literacy support. However, before schools start with assessment data platforms or tools, I recommend that they lock down their decision-making flow: understanding which platforms answer which questions related to intervention and how this data will inform both teacher professional development and the work of an MTSS data team in monitoring student growth toward meeting literacy benchmarks over time.

An effective MTSS system has three key phases or steps:

• Screening: Which students are at risk and in need of literacy intervention?
• Diagnosing: What are the specific literacy gaps of students who are at risk?
• Progress monitoring: How are students responding to intervention?

Many schools I work with are aware of screener tools and data platforms, such as Acadience and NWEA MAP Growth, and administer these assessments accordingly. However, screening tools often only tell us which students are at literacy risk—those from the 40th proficiency percentile to the 21st percentile (Tier 2) and below (Tier 3)—but not why they are at risk.

To ascertain why students might be at risk, I recommend to schools that, as a second step, they administer diagnostic assessments such as the Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR). The ROAR can help MTSS teams assess a student’s understanding of phonics as well as sentence structure, morphology, and vocabulary (patterns) and, ultimately, whether a student has a decoding or reading comprehension issue.

This helps teachers to address student literacy needs within Tier 2 small instruction groups or determine Tier 3 program placement. I include an NYCDOE ladder of intervention that may be of use when assigning a Tier 3 student to appropriate programs.

Both screener and diagnostic assessments should be administered at the beginning, middle, and end of each academic year. I also recommend that schools monitor student progress every two to six weeks, more often for Tier 3 and less for Tier 2, using Acadience. This will tell schools if interventions are working based on student performance trends, such as whether students are growing, stagnant, or decreasing in levels of performance within either Tier 2 or 3. And it will help schools to make ongoing programming decisions. In all, this three-step process speeds up student placement, ensures better alignment, and facilitates clearer meetings.

The ROAR diagnostic assessment measures a middle school student’s words per minute, sentence fluency, morphology, and vocabulary development, while Acadience measures oral reading fluency and comprehension. Both ultimately indicate a student’s skill in decoding and comprehension.

The MTSS Team’s Role in Supporting Teachers

MTSS data can and should also be used to guide educators’ professional development. While many Tier 3 programs are well scripted, schools may or may not be using programs for small Tier 2 group support. General education teachers might therefore find it useful to be trained on instructional strategies specific to developing decoding, oral reading fluency, and comprehension skills when instructing Tier 2 students in small group pullouts during Tier 1 instruction or class time.

For example, students with a diagnosis of low words per minute and/or low fluency on the ROAR would benefit from controlled decoding practice in recognizing and saying vowel teams or words, syllable division, morphology work (prefixes, suffixes, roots), and vocabulary development before teachers transition to providing reading comprehension scaffolds and supports.

If students are still identified as Tier 2 on MAP Growth but are proficient in their word and sentence structure knowledge on ROAR, then, most likely, the gap is not in decoding but rather in vocabulary or morphology. Therefore, the teacher working with small groups during Tier 2 support can proceed immediately to working with students on developing their reading comprehension skills.

MTSS teams, in addition to reviewing MTSS student assessment data, might spend some of their meeting time engaging in walk-throughs of both Tier 2 and 3 instruction, planning follow-up teacher literacy training, and involving parents in data analysis conversations. MTSS teams can also use student work samples, in addition to student assessment data, in designing teacher intervention playlists and progress-monitoring decision trees, in analyzing intervention trends, and, ultimately, in making MTSS programming decisions.

When each teacher in a middle school understands what MTSS literacy data matters, when it matters, how to analyze it, and where to connect instructional decisions to it, student literacy growth becomes scientific, rather than based on perceptions and guesswork.