I watched a few of the Reading Rocket videos about intervention and prevention.
One thing that I really learned from the videos was about progress monitoring. With progress monitoring, the teacher is "testing" the students to find out where they are with their learning and trying to find their problem areas. This is so helpful for teachers because it lets them know what they need to work on more in the classroom and also lets the teacher know what groups she needs to pull and work with.
I also learned about the progress monitoring groups. I never realized that once you do your progress monitoring, the students' results puts them into a group. The groups are benchmark group which are the students who are on grade level, the strategic group which are the student below grade level, and the intensive group which are the students that are even farther below grade level.
The strategic group is a group of students that you as the teacher would give a new strategy to and implement new strategies with to get them up to grade level. This group just needs a little extra time working on the material and maybe a new or different strategy to use with the material.
The intensive group is the group that needs to be serious pulled aside and worked with one on one as much as possible. It is important for this group to learn as many different strategies as possible that will help them grasp the material.
Another video that I watched was about Tier 1differentiation. With this video they stressed the importance of getting those students who need help, the help as soon as possible. It suggested that as early as kindergarten getting those students the extra help, even if it was just extra time on assignments or even pull out during the day with another teacher. In my pre-k class I have 2 students that are already on tier 2 or 3 based on their physical needs and based on the information coming from their personal speech therapy sessions. Since they already had this material and strategies had already been in place, we can skip a tier with them.
With just a little help, students on tier 1 can improve dramatically.
As a special education teacher, a big part of my job is progress monitoring. This allows me to see what my students have learned and what we need to work on. In special education, the tiers of intervention require that you must use some method to monitor what the students are learning. Differentiated instruction is very important. You can not think that all students learn the same because they do not. Though I co-teach with the general education teacher, once the students leave and come to direct instruction with me, my instruction has to be differentiated to meet the student needs where they are academically. This doesn't always get them to grade level, but it does help.
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