Addressing Pandemic Learning Loss: 5 Elementary Intervention Best Practices
This post is part of a three-part series on Making Every Minute Count: 3 Ways to Address Pandemic Learning Loss This Fall, sharing best practice strategies that can be implemented now in elementary schools to make a big difference for students this school year: providing extra-time intervention, rethinking grade-level common planning time, and creating micro-schedules for reading. With tweaks to the elementary school schedule, these best practices can be facilitated and can have immediate impact on student learning.
Addressing Pandemic Learning Loss: 5 Best Practices for Intervention
As students return to school this fall after years of pandemic disruptions, providing best practice intervention will be more important than ever to help kids catch up and master content that is foundational to future learning.
The good news is that best practice intervention is within reach, and there are specific steps school and district leaders can take to shift from existing practice to best practice by rethinking scheduling and staff assignments.
Here are the five best practices for intervention that will set up students for success this school year and enable schools and districts to meet their achievement goals.
Provide extra-time intervention: 30 minutes of additional daily reading intervention for students who need it
Even before the disruption caused by COVID pandemic, far too many students struggled to read. These students need extra time to learn; at least 30 minutes a day of reading intervention with a skilled reading teacher beyond 90 minutes of core reading instruction, not instead of it. When intervention extra help comes at the expense of missing current year core instruction, students who struggle are not being served and will likely continue to struggle.
The reality is that kids who struggle to reach grade-level expectations need 100 percent of core instruction and then some. The standard block just isn't enough.
Scheduling a daily extra-time intervention and enrichment block of at least 30 minutes enables schools to provide this extra time and ensure students remain in and benefit from core instruction by avoiding pull-out for services.
How to find extra instructional time? First, it must be valued, as more time for intervention means less time for something else. Once that value is deeply held, there are many ways to find the needed 30 minutes: some schools alternate science and social studies every other day, and others shorten lunch, recess, or specials.
Ensure content-strong teachers provide intervention
Who provides extra help to students matters—a lot. For extra-time intervention to have the desired impact, it must be delivered by highly effective teachers experience teaching the subject matter of concern.
While generalists can provide general academic support, like homework help or reviewing quiz questions, and paraeducators can help manage behavior, assist with health and safety concerns, and facilitate inclusion, only content-strong staff can help kids who struggle to read learn to read.
Stagger intervention and enrichment blocks across grades
While it might not be the first thing that comes to mind when considering what makes intervention effective, when intervention is scheduled has a big impact on learning opportunities for students who struggle across a school.
Staggering grade-level intervention blocks allows content-strong staff to support more students. If the whole school has intervention at the same time, then 250 or even 450 or more students will need extra help at once. Some intervention groups will inevitably be supported by paraprofessionals because there are not enough certified staff available to cover all the intervention groups. Not only is this not a best practice, but the absence of it is also a long-standing cause of inequity as well.
Staggering intervention and enrichment blocks ensures equal access to intervention for all students at each grade level.
Group students together by area of need for intervention
Grouping students who struggle according to their academic needs for targeted intervention is a key strategy to leverage. When everyone in an intervention block has the same focus area, such as phonics or fluency, the intervention delivered will be much more effective than it would be if some students worked on phonics while others worked on fluency.
At the beginning of the school year, teachers should work together to assess students and establish intervention groups based on student areas of need, and then pair those groups with teachers with a high level of expertise and strengths for each area of need. The groups should be based on targeted concerns, not whether students are in the same homeroom, share teachers, or even have IEPs or are in the same grade. Careful progress monitoring can drive flexible regrouping to best meet changing student needs over time.
Avoid relying on before- or after-school intervention
A far too common so-called solution to finding time for intervention is to offer it before or after school. Before- and after- school intervention, while it may be a path of less resistance, fails to support all students who struggle.
Too many students have transportation limitations or other obligations that prevent them from coming to school early or staying late. All too often, these barriers to participation disproportionately affect historically underserved students, creating yet another inequity that perpetuates the achievement gap.
To ensure high-quality intervention benefits all students, build dedicated intervention and enrichment time into the school day, every day.
By rethinking scheduling and staffing to shift current practices to these best practices for intervention, schools and districts can set all students up for success and meet their achievement goals this school year and beyond.
