Centering Students: Strategic Literacy Interventions for Middle and High School Success
Our nation’s 2024 NAEP data confirms concerning trends in the reading performance of 8th graders, particularly with widening gaps in achievement for economically disadvantaged students. This challenge calls for urgent action to deliver more targeted support to help all students reach their potential as readers. School systems must provide older students with access to grade-level instruction while also providing them with the systematic support needed to surpass the decoding threshold, or the level of decoding skill required for students to read text with adequate accuracy and efficiency to comprehend it.
As middle and high school literacy leaders across the CSGF portfolio continue to build on previous learnings about supporting students’ literacy development, a clear focus on belonging, coherence, and consistency of intervention programs has emerged as a critical factor in driving success for older students. In this insight, we highlight two organizations whose intervention programs illustrate findings of TNTP’s The Opportunity Makers report. By implementing these practices, schools are seeing encouraging, year-over-year gains in students’ reading achievement demonstrating the powerful impact of well-designed, student-centered literacy interventions.
Middle and high school leaders with impactful intervention programs are:
- Creating systems that center student needs
- Building teacher expertise through consistent professional development and coaching
- Fostering student ownership through goal-setting
- Adjusting instruction based on progress monitoring
Creating Systems that Center Student Needs
Too often, constraints, such as staff schedules, class sizes, and room availability, prevent students from receiving the exact interventions that fit their needs. Two students may receive the same score on a universal screener, but their instructional needs could be very different. Without targeted intervention, an instructional mismatch can lead to lost time and student frustration. Schools have overcome these challenges by building systems that create the enabling conditions to truly center student needs.
Promising practices from the field:
Re(set) the vision for literacy intervention and create a doable, coherent program.
At Collegiate Academies, school-wide goals and priorities are communicated during summer training where all staff is presented with the intervention one-pager that clarifies the vision and components of the program. Literacy intervention time is directly tied to school-wide goals, and leaders clearly connect this priority to each staff member’s work.
Universal screeners are completed in the first days of school.
Schools utilize summer orientation and the first days of school to complete universal screeners for literacy intervention. This takes prioritization, planning and getting buy-in from everyone early on, but communicates the importance of these interventions and ensures that students’ daily schedules include their needed intervention time.
At YES Prep, interns load benchmark data into internal trackers, so the network team can quickly work with analytics to organize students into the right intervention course. Then Student Information Services loads course requests to student schedules to support campus staff with scheduling.
Data analysis and small group scheduling has a clear owner with literacy expertise.
While intervention scheduling is a team effort and school operations play an essential role in grouping students, it is also important to have an instructional leader driving the process who has a clear understanding of the assessments and the content of each intervention. In cases where assessment data isn’t totally clear, a leader with literacy expertise can analyze these data nuances, and follow up with students to collect any additional data on their strengths and needs.
Building Teacher Expertise through Consistent Professional Development and Coaching
Effective coaching is an essential lever in strengthening instructional practice and driving student achievement. For secondary literacy, it begins with building knowledge of how the brain learns to read and both leader and teacher training on foundational skills instruction. This understanding clarifies the purpose of the interventions and ensures teachers can apply this knowledge to instruction.
At YES Prep Public Schools in Houston, middle and high school intervention teachers attend a decoding bootcamp over the summer as well as training on the specific course they will teach, such as Corrective Reading. Throughout the year, they are provided with consistent coaching focused on lesson planning and practice, receiving real-time feedback during observations, and adapting lessons for individual student needs. “Student growth in reading intervention happens through accuracy, accountability, and feedback, so teachers must know phonemes and how to teach them, a skill often not taught to secondary teachers,” shares Seeta Estrada, Managing Director of Secondary Academics at YES Prep. “This is why training and coaching for teachers must be specific to the course and grounded in the science of reading. This year, we redesigned our training, planning supports, and coaching to focus specifically on fidelity of curriculum implementation and we have already seen 15% higher growth for students at the MOY than last year.”
The district team at YES Prep also provides priorities for each course with sticky images that are revisited during professional learning across the school year. While priorities of courses differ to align to specific curriculum goals, priorities are strategically designed and communicated, which allows for consistency in coaching for both teachers and students. For example, English course instructional priorities are displayed on the left image below. On the right image, intervention priorities align, but also focus on word recognition elements connected to the intervention curriculum.
In addition to consistent coaching anchored in clear priorities, matching coaches to teachers based on content expertise can also accelerate teacher development. At G.W. Carver High School, a Collegiate Academies school in New Orleans, reading interventionists are coached by teacher leaders who also teach the same program to a cohort of students. Teacher leaders can model a tricky part of the lesson and co-plan lessons, and teachers can observe those lessons prior to implementing themselves.
Fostering Student Ownership through Goal-setting
As mentioned above, assessing early to pinpoint student needs is essential in ensuring students are receiving the supports that match their strengths and needs. Once intervention groups are established, setting individualized goals with students and consistently monitoring progress fosters student ownership and creates opportunities to celebrate growth, building momentum for students and teachers.
At YES Prep, literacy intervention classes begin the year with a goal-setting project where students review their current literacy scores, set middle and end of year goals, and establish a plan for strategies to support meeting their goals. Teachers revisit the goal-setting project throughout the year and chart progress along the way.
You can find the goal-setting lesson materials and rubric here.
At Collegiate Academies, intervention teachers hold frequent individual conferences with students to review their aimsweb+ fluency instructional levels to share data with students, discuss progress towards goals, and collaboratively set new goals or adjust interventions as needed.
Adjusting Instruction Based on Progress Monitoring
When YES Prep leaders noticed that students were not progressing in fluency at similar rates to the previous year, they shared this data during action planning meetings. Determining a need for stronger fluency instruction, teachers adjusted instruction by incorporating partner reading into English course instruction and adding a fluency protocol to intervention time. Leaders supported teachers through this change by facilitating professional development where the new components were introduced, modeled, and practiced together. Leaders also incorporated the new fluency instructional practices into the teacher observation tool and discussed them during weekly coaching meetings. By identifying a clear action step and providing coaching follow-up support through observations, fluency instruction improved, which led to more student practice and improvement.
Targeted Interventions Lead to Student Success
With coherent and consistent systems for research-based assessment and scheduling, PD and coaching focused on building content knowledge, and frequent opportunities to monitor goals, celebrate progress, and adjust instruction, schools can dramatically accelerate reading outcomes for older students.
Ready to put these insights into action? Check out the Middle and High School Literacy Intervention Planning Guide, a practical resource designed to support leaders in strengthening their literacy intervention programs.
Are you just getting started? Use the guide to audit your current approach and select a research-based assessment that aligns with your goals.
Do you already have intervention systems in place? The guide can serve as a checklist to identify areas of improvement and help you prioritize next steps.
No matter where you are in your journey, we hope this tool can help bring greater clarity, coherence, and impact to your literacy interventions.
