How to Change Up Intervention Groups

Intervention work can be complex for a multitude of reasons. Data needs to be collected, analyzed, and utilized for forming groups and planning instruction; students are at varying levels of deficits in their learning; and time is always working against us. If things are working smoothly, students would exit or enter interventions as needed. Groups are meant to be fluid, but their fluidity can also be overwhelming. The level of support provided should match the current level of student need. I find one of the trickiest parts of the puzzle to be the reconfiguring of groups once the school year has gotten underway. It’s not complicated if an entire group improves and exits the intervention, but that’s not always the case.

Sometimes students need more intensive support or a change in intervention, or they are combined with other students who are just joining the group. When this happens, it’s important to find a way to seamlessly transition new students into existing groups without losing momentum. In my experience, the best way to accomplish this is to look closely at the current data, set the tone through clear procedures and routines, and continue to build community in our space.

Data Always Leads

Revisiting data is essential because it informs how we will modify intervention groups. Some students may not be making accelerated progress. This might lead your team to alter the intervention or intensify the intervention by adjusting the group size.

Some students are making accelerated progress but are not yet at their benchmark goal. Students in a variety of groups might be better matches for each other than their initial data demonstrated. For example, some of the students in the group might have become highly accurate, while others haven’t. Utilizing diagnostic assessments can provide the additional information you need in order to determine how to group students in new ways. Once this step has been thoroughly examined, it’s time to get groups up and running again.

Routines are an Absolute Necessity

An area that I lean on when I’m restructuring intervention groups is to explicitly review and/or introduce routines and procedures. If I have students who remain in a particular group, I can highlight them as models of how to work through some of the activities in the lesson.

I take the first week of any group to explain the activities that we’ll engage in and model what that looks like. For example, if my group is learning a strategy for decoding multisyllabic words, I’ll explain the expectations of how they are to respond. I may ask a student who has been in the previous group to demonstrate the procedure for our new students.

We often think of procedures as an essential component of classroom instruction. Intervention is no different. In fact, the structure that routines provide lightens the cognitive load for many students so that they can attend to the content without having to guess the procedural knowledge.

I have found certain procedures to be extremely effective for this: reviewing how to use whiteboards for responding, setting expectations around choral reading or choral response, or setting expectations in relation to “do nows” that are completed when students first enter the room. We also discuss how to engage in our fluency reading and graphing and what the purpose of the intervention is.

This helps students understand why they’re receiving interventions and what they’re working toward. Because I use a speech-to-print curriculum, it’s essential that students have some foundational understanding of how speech and symbols work. When I add new members to a group, I make sure to review these foundational concepts:

• Every sound is represented by graphemes.
• Sounds can be spelled with one to four graphemes.
• One spelling can represent multiple sounds.
• Saying sounds before we write is crucial.

Even if I have students who are aware of these concepts, taking a step back for newcomers is beneficial to everyone in the group. This levels the playing field for all of my students no matter the time of year.

Establishing a Sense of Belonging

Creating or re-creating a safe learning environment when students are new to intervention groups shouldn’t be overlooked. Building community is important so that students feel safe to take risks and grow. Learning isn’t about getting everything correct. It’s through the mistakes, corrections, and reattempts that we grow the most.

When new students join already formed groups, it’s helpful to make introductions, especially if students come from multiple classrooms. Assigning new partners for structures like think-pair-share is necessary so that instruction runs smoothly. It takes time to build community, but making sure that students are respectful and encouraging to each other goes a long way. Many students often like to share with the group things they are involved in, so making sure to take a minute or two to weave that into your work can help build rapport with the new group.

Making the Most of the Time we Have

Intervention work doesn’t have the luxury of time. Every second counts because interventionists are tasked with helping to support children who need to improve their literacy skills as quickly as possible. Reforming intervention groups can feel insurmountable at times, but the essentials—acquiring additional data, implementing routines and procedures, and fostering connections—all contribute to making group adjustments more effective and manageable, and they lead to better outcomes for all.