Reading Intervention
We help schools implement reading intervention across the tiers, with a specific focus on grades 6 to 12. There is no curriculum to buy here. We work with what your school has already adopted, and with the texts your students are already reading.
We work with readers at every grade level, and the focus of this work is grades 6 to 12. Structured literacy at secondary is its own problem, and it is the part schools most often ask us for.
By sixth grade a student who can't decode has spent years building workarounds: listening hard, copying from a neighbor, guessing from context, avoiding being called on. The skill gap is real, and so is everything the student has built on top of it.
Structured literacy still works at this age. What has to change is the material, the pacing, and the way the whole thing is framed, because a fourteen year old won't sit in an intervention that treats them like a six year old.
Schools rarely fail at reading intervention because they picked the wrong curriculum. They fail at the four decisions around it, and those are where this work lives, which is why it transfers to whatever you have already bought.
Who needs more than Tier 1?
Use the universal screening data you already collect, rather than adding another assessment to a calendar that can't hold one.
Which tier, and how do we know?
A short series of checks rather than one cut score, so no student's placement rests on a single test. Intervention seats are limited, and this is what makes the decision defensible when a family asks why their student is not in one.
Which skill is actually breaking down?
Two students in the same tier rarely need the same thing. The tier sets the intensity, the group size and how often they meet. What gets taught inside it depends on where reading is breaking down for that student.
When does a student come back out?
Progress monitoring all year with real exit criteria, so students who are ready move out and the seat goes to someone who needs it. This is the step that usually has no owner, so groups quietly fill up and stay full for the year.
We support implementation across every area of the Science of Reading, and across how adolescents in particular learn to read. A student in Tier 2 and a student in Tier 3 might both need morphology. What changes between them is intensity, not the skill.
They understand far more than they can decode
Explicit, systematic instruction for the students with the most intensive needs. At secondary this is the smallest group and the most intensive work, and it is where most schools are still building capacity, because secondary staff are trained for content rather than for decoding.
Short words are solid, longer ones are the next step
The biggest lever available in middle and high school. Most of the new words an adolescent meets can be taken apart by their parts, so teaching the parts gives a student a strategy for words nobody has pre-taught them.
They are reading connected text, with accuracy, rate or expression still building
Three things together: accuracy, rate and prosody. Repeated oral reading practice with weekly cold and warm probes, so the student can see the line moving. Often the only thing a student close to grade level needs.
They can read the word, the meaning is not there yet
Taught through the content they're already reading rather than from a list, so the words show up again the same week in a class that matters to them.
They read the whole passage, and making sense of it is still developing
Strategy instruction tied to real course texts, and the background knowledge that comprehension actually runs on. This is where intervention and the content classroom have to be talking to each other.
They have worked at this for years without it paying off
The area most programs leave out, and the one that decides whether any of the rest lands. A student who has worked at reading for six years without it clicking brings that history into the room, and it has to be planned for.
A placement guide for readers in grades 6 to 12. Three short checks using screening data you already collect, what each result means for placement, and a worksheet for writing your own thresholds before the year starts.
It also covers something secondary schools rarely get told: the most widely used fluency norms stop at grade 6, so a cut score carried up from elementary is not measuring what you think it is.
Students tell us a program is working before any assessment does, and what they name is almost never schoolwork.
I can read the freeway signs now.Student in reading intervention
I can read the menu at the restaurant.Student in reading intervention
I understand my friends' text messages now.Student in reading intervention
Across 12 schools that year, 73 percent of these students earned a C or higher in core English. All were in grades 6 to 12 with IEPs, reading below the 30th percentile, and intervention had not worked for them before.
A reading program that runs on one outside consultant leaves when the consultant does. We measure this work by how much of it your own staff can run without us.
The placement process, the progress monitoring, the exit criteria and the schedule all get documented and taught to whoever owns them on your staff. If a year later the only person who understands how placement works is us, we did it wrong.
She has helped to develop programs at my school site, coach a variety of teachers and school staff members, and pushed for the creation of a reading program for students with Dyslexia and other language-based disabilities. This program has seen students grow up to 3 years in reading proficiency in 1 school year alone.Whitney L., special education teacher
Most schools already know which students need more. The harder question is what each one actually needs, and whether the support they are getting now is working. That's a good first conversation, whatever program you're running.
No. There is no curriculum to buy here. We work with what your school has already adopted, and with the texts your students are already reading.
Most Science of Reading training is built for kindergarten through fifth grade. The structured literacy content still works at secondary, but the material, the pacing and the framing all have to change, because a fourteen year old will not sit in an intervention that treats them like a six year old.
A short series of checks rather than one cut score, built on screening data you already collect, with the thresholds written down so the decision survives a change of staff.
The most widely used oral reading fluency norms stop at grade 6, so a cut score carried up from elementary is not measuring what you think it is. We help schools write their own thresholds, fitted to their students, before the year starts.
Implementation across every area of the Science of Reading: phonemic awareness and phonics, word study including morphology and syllabication, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and motivation and reader identity.
Layered Education