https://fl.thereadingleague.org/, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIVITubOXOJav_Ecc-9bB6w

The Reading League FL, Downtown St. Petersburg, FL (2026)

06/07/2026

The research base on main-idea and summary writing strategies is extremely deep. We’ve known for decades that writing in response to reading improves comprehension of text more than most other comprehension strategies, and teaching students to summarize text is a powerful lever that we can pull. If you haven’t read Graham and Hebert’s 2010 Writing to Read report, it’s an excellent one!https://media.carnegie.org/filer_public/9d/e2/9de20604-a055-42da-bc00-77da949b29d7/ccny_report_2010_writing.pdf

Teaching students to “Get the Gist” and summarize text appears across so many different evidence-based comprehension approaches. One approach that has many years of research showing its effectiveness, and teaches students gist and summary writing among a few other high utility strategies, is Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR). Here is a link to the most updated 2025 version of the curriculum, care of the Meadows Center at the University of Texas: https://meadowscenter.org/resource/ca-csr-lessons/. The full curriculum is built around Texas standards, but exemplifies instruction nicely.

One article we love about main idea/gist writing is Using Paraphrasing and Text Structure Instruction to Support Main Idea Generation from Drs. Sharon Vaugh and Elizabeth Stevens. Gists are small main ideas. Students write a brief, in-their-own-words main idea sentence after each section of text (typically 1–3 paragraphs). A summary is what you get when you string together multiple gists and connect the ideas using text structure. The connection can happen through students' knowledge of text structure and their use of key signal words tied to each text structure: although, because, so, consequently, next, in contrast, as a result, and so on. Those connectives are key for understanding and showing the underlying logical structure of the text. We’ve attached some screenshots of some good parts of the article, but here’s a breakdown too:

Main idea is a tough skill, especially for students with language-based learning difficulties.

It breaks a hard skill into 3 steps- (1) Who or what is this mostly about? (2) What's the most important idea about that who/what? (3) Put it together to write the gist.

It builds toward summarizing: Students who can gist a paragraph are far better prepared to summarize a whole text later on.

Step 2 is the hardest one for many students: Kids often grab a random detail instead of the most important idea. Teach text structure (description, problem–solution, compare–contrast) as a "fix-up" tool, alongside rereading and checking headings.

Model, then release: I do, we do, you do. Think aloud as you find the gist, practice together, then let them try independently with feedback.

Several prominent reading researchers wrote this 2019 paper: "The 'GIST' of the Reading Comprehension Problem in Grades 4 and 5."https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED624292.pdf It makes the case that summary writing is a key missing skill in upper elementary literacy instruction. Key points to understand:
Across two years of Texas state assessment data, students in grades 4 and 5 scored significantly lower on main idea and summary items than on any other comprehension item type (vocabulary, text structure, comparison, etc.). Summary and main idea were clearly the weak link.

Most classroom instruction in summarizing isn't evidence-based. Surveys of 155 teachers showed widespread use of strategies like hashtags, "beginning-middle-end," "somebody-wanted-but-so-then," and "caveman talk." The authors argue that these condensed texts don't teach students to identify main ideas or connect ideas across sections, which is the actual cognitive work that a summary requires.

Where evidence-based strategies (text structure, main idea, summarization) are used, they're poorly scaffolded. Textbook analyses show these skills appear on a 6–8 week spiral with too little practice between exposures for students to consolidate them. This goes along with the critique of the "skill of the week" approach, rather than teaching a small number of high leverage strategies (like summary) and using them consistently over the year as a tool to access and process content and text.

After a full day of PD that modeled paraphrasing into one's own words, teachers were asked to write a main idea for an article on Hurricane Harvey. Average score: 5.8 out of 8. Of the 72% who wrote an acceptable main idea, 80%+ copied sentences verbatim from the text rather than synthesizing in their own words. The authors call this "knowledge retelling rather than knowledge transformation." The implication is that we can't expect students to synthesize across sections if the adults teaching them are stuck at copy-delete themselves. Summary instruction has to be taught explicitly and practiced for teachers and students.

Bottom line: gist/main idea and summary are high-leverage, under-taught and often poorly taught skills, and the path forward is explicit instruction using text structure as the scaffold for both generating main ideas and integrating them into a synthesized summary.

05/09/2026

We learned a lot from this new research brief about high-leverage comprehension practices that could help districts, schools, and teachers consistently deliver high-quality instruction.

From the introduction: "This brief examines the extent to which teachers in districts using high quality instructional materials implemented them in ways that supported students’ robust comprehension. Findings show that these districts have all reached a level of implementation of their comprehension HQIM that features near-universal focus on comprehension with quality texts and active student participation across hundreds of classrooms. However, most lessons, two thirds, resulted in teachers and students doing work that only facilitated surface-level understanding of texts. In this brief, we explain how we discovered this problem hiding in plain sight and identify high-leverage comprehension practices that could help districts, schools, and teachers consistently deliver high-quality instruction."

Full brief:https://www.sri.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Learning-Brief_11052025_Acc.pdf

For leaders, it provides action steps to take to deepen HQIM
implementation and support robust student
comprehension:

Action 1: Articulate and communicate a vision for instruction oriented toward robust comprehension

- Build a shared, clear understanding of the instructional practices that guide students toward robust understanding of texts

- Set explicit goals around robust comprehension (e.g., every lesson includes a robust comprehension objective; teachers model metacognition during each lesson; students regularly write to build understanding of texts)

- Communicate the vision and goals consistently across the system, with messaging tailored to principals, coaches, and teachers

Action 2: Build teachers' professional capacity to facilitate robust understanding through existing structures

- Deepen lesson internalization (move beyond the what of the curriculum to the how, and ensure teachers have a strong understanding of the texts and content their HQIM is teaching)

- Model and rehearse high-leverage instructional practices targeting robust comprehension work (use video libraries, peer modeling, and "at bats" — anchored in robust lesson objectives)

- Build coaching capacity (support coaches to guide teachers toward comprehension instruction oriented to robust understanding, through cycles of planning, modeling, observation, and feedback)

Action 3: Align tools and procedures to gauge the extent to which lessons foster robust understanding of text

- Align classroom observation tools (revise walkthrough and coaching protocols so they capture robust vs. surface-level comprehension, not just easy-to-observe features like participation or posted objectives)

- Establish procedures for using comprehension assessment data (avoid narrow standard-by-standard analysis that reinforces surface-level instruction; focus on whether students are making meaning of the texts themselves)

Thanks to the good folks at SRI for this work!

04/27/2026

Are you interested in the conversation around tier 1 curriculum implementation? Maybe also how it intersects, and doesn't intersect, with principles of effective explicit instruction? Our past president recently delivered a webinar for The Florida Department of Education called Beyond the Teacher’s Guide: Strengthening Tier 1 Through Explicit Instruction.

Here's the description: Many teachers follow their Tier 1 literacy curriculum faithfully and still find that too many students aren't making the progress they should. This session explores some of the reasons why, through the lens of explicit and systematic instruction. Participants will examine what explicit instruction actually means, work through concrete examples and nonexamples, and analyze how common features of curricula do and do not align with evidence-based instructional principles. Rather than evaluating or recommending specific programs, this session is designed to help teachers become more effective and critical consumers of whatever curriculum they are using.

Link to the recording here: https://fldoe.sharefile.com/share/view/s3318b1fee1084f948c8f930d4c100dfe

Slide deck here:https://www.fldoe.org/file/7539/BeyondTier1.pdf

Check out the excellent previous FLDOE webinars here: https://www.fldoe.org/academics/standards/just-read-fl/webinars.stml

Some of the resources we mention in the webinar:

- Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies that All Teacher Should Know:https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/Rosenshine.pdf

- Get the Gist Toolkit: https://greatmiddleschools.org/toolkits/reading/get-the-gist/

- Anita Archer's Explicit Instruction website: https://explicitinstruction.org/

- Meta Analysis on the effects of teacher-directed opportunities to respond:https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1070193.pdf

- Effective Approaches for Scheduling and Formatting Practice Distributed, Cumulative, and Interleaved Practice: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338701579_Effective_Approaches_for_Scheduling_and_Formatting_Practice_Distributed_Cumulative_and_Interleaved_Practice

04/22/2026

New research alert! A new open-access study just came out in April in Reading Research Quarterly that elementary teachers, coaches, administrators, and others should take a look at! It adds to the growing evidence base on using more complex text during intervention.

Access the full article for free here: https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/rrq.70117

Downs, Hiebert, Conradi Smith, and Martz compared two interventions for third graders reading below the 40th percentile on a screener. One group (the "Read Like Us" condition, which is the name of the intervention) worked with informational texts at a Grades 4–5 complexity band, organized into twelve coherent topic areas (civics, earth and space science, etc.). Before each text, students received brief, explicit instruction on three multisyllabic words pulled directly from that day's reading, using a "peel-off" strategy to identify affixes, locate remaining vowels, break into syllables, and blend the parts. No syllable type instruction occurred. Then, they read the text five times across the session, moving from a listening preview to independent whisper reading. The comparison group used Corrective Reading, a well-established and evidence-based Direct Instruction curriculum. Both interventions ran about forty minutes a day for sixty sessions, so this is a pretty intensive intervention as far as schools would be able to implement.

The headline findings are that students reading the harder texts made greater gains in reading accuracy than when compared with Corrective Reading, the fluency growth was essentially equivalent between conditions despite the massive difference in text complexity between the groups, and importantly the students who started with the lowest accuracy (as measured by pre-intervention DIBELS ORF scores) made the greatest gains in the complex-text intervention.

This is another piece of evidence challenging the tendency to place intermediate striving readers in simplified leveled texts. The field has accumulated enough of these studies now that we could feel confident pushing back, gently and with evidence, when others assume appropriately scaffolded complex text is off-limits for students during intervention. The key qualifier is "appropriately scaffolded."

Second, the word study design in Read Like Us is instructive for how we talk about multisyllabic instruction. Rather than front-loading long lists of decontextualized words organized by orthographic pattern or syllable type, the authors used a small number of conceptually important words per text, taught a flexible morphological strategy, and ensured every taught word showed up repeatedly in the text students were about to read.

From the intervention description in the paper: "In total, each target word was encountered approximately 50 times: 27 initial exposures during word study. followed by approximately 25 exposures in connected text (approximately five repetitions per word within the text and each text was read five times)". That tight coupling between word study and connected reading (where roughly twenty percent of the session is word work and eighty percent is text reading) is a different picture than other word reading interventions offer which flip that ratio and emphasize mostly word list reading. This is definitely worth discussing with teachers who are trying to figure out how to allocate limited intervention minutes.

A few caveats: it's a quasi-experimental design rather than randomization, so the study can't fully isolate which feature of the intervention drove the gains, and there was no direct measure of knowledge or vocabulary learning. So, the study was not able to answer which of the intervention conditions was more effective for gains in those language skills. Still, the pattern of findings fits with a growing body of work text selection, scaffolding, and what striving readers can actually handle.

04/17/2026

Let’s talk about IQ testing as used in special education evaluations for Specific Learning Disabilities. Have you ever seen evaluation reports with pages and pages of recommendations that call for integrating strategies for visual-spatial processing, long-term retrieval, and other cognitive skills measured by an IQ test? And maybe diagnoses or finds eligibility based on patterns among these cognitive scores?

It may surprise you to know that IQ testing and differentiating interventions based on patterns among IQ test scores do not improve intervention outcomes for the vast majority of students. This begs the question: Why do many school psychologists keep recommending it and why do we keep doing it? Research-to-practice gaps are everywhere in education, including with school psychologists and in special education evaluations.

IQ tests measure things like working memory, processing speed, visual-spatial processing, long term memory, and nonverbal reasoning. Sounds useful, right? The problem is that tailoring instruction or specially designed instruction to patterns among those scores has not been shown to work better than evidence-based instruction grounded in academic screening, diagnostic, progress monitoring, and summative assessment data. Over 200 studies across multiple meta-analyses make this clear.

This isn't an indictment of school psychologists, just as a critique of ineffective teaching practices isn’t an indictment of teachers. It's an indictment of a system that trains school psychologists to do it this way, and of the textbooks and test manuals that continue to recommend “profile analysis” despite the research saying otherwise. The school psychologists who are part of The Reading League Florida were taught this. It makes intuitive sense, but the evidence has been accumulating for decades, and it's time we listened to it.

So what does this mean practically?

Florida's rules do not require an IQ test for every SLD evaluation, only when another exceptionality (like intellectual disability or giftedness) is suspected. That's actually the right call. An RtI-based evaluation approach, while flawed and imperfect, is the best of the imperfect ways to identify SLD.

There are other ways to identify SLD, including Pattern of Strengths and Weaknesses (PSW). PSW isn't the answer. A 2024 systematic review found that PSW accurately identifies SLD at roughly the level of a coin flip. That's not a standard we should be comfortable applying to kids' lives.

None of this is easy to hear. These are our tools, our training, our professional identity. But our job is to advocate for students, and that means following the evidence even when it challenges us!
Want to dig deeper? Here are the key papers:

Dombrowski, Benson, & Maki (2025) — "A Systematic Review of the PSW Diagnostic Accuracy Evidence for SLD Identification: Is It Time to Abandon PSW?" School Psychology Review https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2372966X.2024.2369494 PSW was found to identify SLD no better than chance across all methods and instruments reviewed. The authors conclude it may not be worth the time and effort for SLD identification.

Farmer, McGill, Dombrowski, & Canivez (2021) — "Why Questionable Assessment Practices Remain Popular in School Psychology: Instructional Materials as Pedagogic Vehicles" Canadian Journal of School Psychology https://ux1.eiu.edu/~glcanivez/Adobe%20pdf/Publications-Papers/Farmer,%20McGill,%20Dombrowski,%20&%20Canivez%20(2021)%20Questionable%20Assessment%20Practices.pdf The major textbooks and test manuals used to train school psychologists continue to recommend low-value IQ profile analysis despite contrary peer-reviewed evidence. Graduate training itself may be the pipeline for perpetuating these practices.

Fletcher & Miciak (2017) — "Comprehensive Cognitive Assessments Are Not Necessary for the Identification and Treatment of Learning Disabilities" Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology https://academic.oup.com/acn/article/32/1/2/2655684?login=false Comprehensive cognitive testing adds little to treatment planning or SLD identification. Lower-inference, literacy skills-based assessment approaches are more directly useful for guiding intervention.

VanDerHeyden (2018) — "Why Do School Psychologists Cling to Ineffective Practices? Let's Do What Works" School Psychology Forum: Research in Practice https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324065605_Why_Do_School_Psychologists_Cling_to_Ineffective_Practices_Let's_Do_What_Works School psychologists often continue using practices that haven't demonstrated benefit for students. VanDerHeyden examines why, and identifies concrete paths forward toward evidence-based assessment and intervention.

Burns et al. (2016) — "Meta-analysis of Academic Interventions Derived from Neuropsychological Data" School Psychology Quarterly https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/psyc_fac_pubs/249/ Across 37 studies, interventions based on cognitive/neuropsychological data produced only small effects, while interventions based on direct academic skills measures (reading fluency, phonemic awareness) produced moderate effects. The data favor skills-based over cognitively-derived intervention planning.

Burns (2016) — "Effect of Cognitive Processing Assessments and Interventions on Academic Outcomes: Can 200 Studies Be Wrong?" NASP Communiqué, Vol. 44, Issue 5 https://www.nasponline.org/publications/periodicals/communique/issues/volume-44-issue-5/effect-of-cognitive-processing-assessments-and-interventions-on-academic-outcomes-can-200-studies-be-wrong More than 200 studies found negligible to small effects for cognitive assessments and interventions on reading and math outcomes. Using cognitive data to inform intervention does not improve effectiveness and may divert attention from what actually works.

Kearns & Fuchs (2013) — "Does Cognitively Focused Instruction Improve the Academic Performance of Low-Achieving Students?" Exceptional Childrenhttps://gseuphsdlibrary.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/does-cognitively-focused-instruction-improve-the-academic-performance-of-low-achieving-students.pdf A review of 50 pertinent studies found that while some cognitive interventions showed promise, the overall body of evidence does not support the use of cognitively focused instruction as a primary approach for low-achieving students at this time.

03/29/2026

Another article we love, written for secondary teachers, coaches, and administrators: Evidence-Based Reading Instruction for Secondary Students Within MTSS: What Every Educator Needs to Know. Here's a summary:

This article by Capin and colleagues lays out a practical, evidence-based framework for how secondary schools can use Multitiered Systems of Support (MTSS) to deliver high-quality reading instruction across three tiers. A key understanding is that the text and content students are learning at Tier 2 and Tier 3 is not different from their Tier 1 content area texts! This is such a fundamental shift from our current way of work, which is providing a steady diet of low-level text during intervention. Here's what every teacher, coach, and administrator should know.

The Big Idea: Same Text, Different Instruction

One of the most powerful takeaways from this article is that students across all three tiers can engage with the same reading passage and content objectives, but the way instruction is delivered changes dramatically based on student need. The authors illustrate this using three lesson plans built around a single text about Claudette Colvin and the civil rights movement. The content stays the same. What changes is:

- What reading skills are targeted (e.g., comprehension and vocabulary only at tier 1 vs. comprehension + vocabulary + decoding + fluency at tiers 2 and 3)
- How explicit the instruction is (modeling increases, scaffolds increase, group sizes decrease)
- How much time is allocated (Tier 1 = 50 min, Tier 2 = 75 min, Tier 3 = 90 min)

This means students receiving Tier 2 or Tier 3 instruction are NOT getting watered-down content. They're getting intensified instruction that addresses their underlying reading difficulties while still building grade-level content knowledge.

Tier 1: Core Instruction for All Students- See the lesson plans

Whole class (20–30 students), with small groups of 4 during reading
Time: ~50 minutes

Tier 1 is about integrating vocabulary and reading comprehension strategy instruction directly into content-area teaching. Research shows this approach improves content knowledge, and the largest effects on content outcomes have been found for students with reading disabilities and English learners.

Key Instructional Practices in Tier 1:

Explicit Vocabulary Instruction Using Graphic Organizers
Before reading, teach 2–3 preselected vocabulary words using a structured graphic organizer that includes:
- The word and its pronunciation
- A student-friendly definition
- Synonyms or related words
- A visual representation
- Two example sentences (one connected to students' lives, one connected to the content)
- Turn-and-talk discussion questions

This isn't a "look it up in the dictionary" approach. Students see words in multiple contexts, discuss them with peers, and practice using them in oral language. After reading, students write sentences using the vocabulary words in their own words , because effective vocabulary instruction requires multiple encounters across reading and writing.

Reading Comprehension Strategy Instruction: "Get the Gist"
Teach students to identify main ideas using the "get the gist" strategy:
1. Identify the most important "who" or "what" in a section
2. Determine the most important information about that "who" or "what"
3. Write a gist statement in 10 words or less

The teacher models this using think-aloud procedures, literally narrating their thinking process step by step. Then, students practice in small groups with teacher feedback. This process needs to be repeated over multiple days until students can apply it independently.

Cooperative Learning Structures
Students work in predetermined groups of four with assigned roles (leader, note-taker, reader, timekeeper). The teacher explicitly teaches how to work cooperatively, models each role, and provides ongoing feedback. Students can use checklists to give each other constructive feedback on their gist statements, with sentence starters like: "I like how you... but I think it would be more effective if you..."

Content-Focused Comprehension Purpose Questions (CPQs)
Before reading, the teacher sets a purpose question tied to the content objective. This keeps students focused on building knowledge, not just practicing reading skills in isolation.

Tier 2: Strategic Intervention

Setting:Smaller groups (10–12 students), pairs during reading
Time:~75 minutes

Tier 2 is for students who are struggling to keep pace with peers, often those who scored near the cut point on state tests or screening measures. The critical difference from Tier 1: Tier 2 adds instruction in multisyllable word reading and reading fluency because these are the underlying difficulties many of these students are experiencing.

What Gets Added in Tier 2:

Multisyllable Word Reading Instruction
Many struggling readers stumble on multisyllable words and these words are often critical to understanding text meaning. The teacher:
- Has students practice reading 8–10 selected affixes (e.g., *pre-*, *dis-*, *-tion*)
- Reviews syllable types with partners
- Models strategic word reading using 2–3 preselected words from the day's text
- Demonstrates how to break off prefixes and suffixes, identify syllable boundaries, and blend syllables together
- Has students practice in pairs with teacher feedback

This instruction is kept brief and focused on words students will actually encounter in that day's reading, making the text more accessible.

Reading Fluency Through Repeated Reading
- First read:Teacher models fluent reading, emphasizing accuracy, appropriate pace, and prosody
- Second read: Students work in pairs, one reads aloud while the partner listens and provides feedback
- Third read:Partners switch roles

The stronger reader goes first to provide a model. Peers can use flowcharts or checklists to prompt their partner when they struggle with a word (e.g., "Are there any parts you know?" or "Sound it out, chunk by chunk" or "Does that word make sense?").

What Gets Intensified in Tier 2:

More Explicit Instruction
- Additional teacher-led modeling and guided practice of comprehension strategies *before* releasing students to work in groups
- Student scaffolds such as index cards showing the gist strategy questions
- Sentence stems to support writing and vocabulary use during the after-reading phase

More Opportunities to Practice Vocabulary
- Students hear vocabulary words used in context through additional teacher modeling
- Students practice determining whether words are used correctly by raising thumbs up/thumbs down response cards

The I Do, We Do, You Do Cycle Becomes Iterative, Not Linear
For students with reading difficulties, learning doesn't follow a neat sequence. The teacher provides additional modeling and guided practice whenever students demonstrate difficulty, cycling back through "I do" and "we do" as many times as needed before expecting independent application.

Tier 3: Intensive Intervention

Setting: Small groups (3–10 students overall, groups of 2–3 during reading)
Time:~90 minutes

Tier 3 is for students with the most significant reading difficulties, many of whom enter secondary grades with foundational word reading deficits. The student-to-teacher ratio is reduced to ensure adequate time for individual responses and feedback.

What Gets Added in Tier 3:

Foundational Word Reading: Vowel Sound Practice
Students practice reading vowel sounds (short vowels, long vowels, vowel + r) in isolation and then identify those sounds in real words. The teacher uses a mix of individual and choral responses to maintain engagement and provide many opportunities to respond.

Even More Intensive Multisyllable Word Reading and Fluency
Building on the Tier 2 approach, but with the addition of foundational vowel work before moving to affixes and syllable strategies.

What Gets Intensified in Tier 3:

Maximum Explicitness
- Text is divided into shorter, more manageable sections with more frequent comprehension checks
- Comprehension strategies are broken down into their most basic component parts using detailed think-aloud procedures
- Additional scaffolds like graphic organizers support student writing (e.g., using gist statements to write summaries)

Smaller Groups for Practice
- During reading, students work in groups of 2–3 instead of groups of 4
- The teacher provides even more individualized feedback

CPQ Integration Throughout
Rather than just setting the purpose question at the beginning, the teacher reminds students of the CPQ throughout the lesson and asks related questions continuously, keeping content knowledge building at the center even while addressing foundational reading skills.

The key point: Even in Tier 3, students still engage with grade-level content and build knowledge. The increased focus on word reading reflects targeted instruction based on assessed need — but it doesn't come at the expense of meaningful content engagement.

Addressing Motivation and Behavioral Challenges

This section of the article is essential reading. Learning difficulties and behavior difficulties frequently co-occur. Many students who have experienced years of academic failure struggle with both internalizing challenges (like reading anxiety) and externalizing challenges (like oppositional behaviors). You cannot improve reading achievement for these students without addressing motivation

Building Intrinsic Motivation
- Help students identify existing interests (through interest inventories) and locate texts on topics they care about
- Provide scaffolded choices — let students choose between two texts or two strategies
- Gradually expand from existing interests to related topics

Building Self-Efficacy
- Use strategy-use checklists so students can see their own progress
- Provide task-specific feedback that draws attention to successful strategy use: "See how you used your vocabulary strategy — notice how it helped you figure out that unknown word"

Leveraging Social Motivation
- Structure cooperative learning so all group members engage meaningfully
- Scaffold work so every student has a role and can contribute

Showing the Value of Reading
- Connect reading to real-world problem solving
- Use texts that represent the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of your classroom and school community

Using Extrinsic Motivators Strategically
- Start with extrinsic motivators (e.g., 5 minutes to listen to music at the end of class) if needed
- Have students log what they "like" about reading experiences
- Gradually help students identify texts they'll enjoy based on their own data
- Fade the extrinsic motivator over time as intrinsic interest develops

Setting Behavioral Goals
When challenging behaviors interfere with learning:
1. Set explicit, positive, measurable behavioral goals using student-friendly language (e.g., "When partner reading today, I will only make comments related to the text we're reading")
2. Model the expected behavior with think-alouds, then practice examples and nonexamples
3. Provide behavior-specific praise when expectations are met and behavior-specific corrective feedback when they're not
4. Facilitate student self-monitoring using timers (every 10 minutes) and self-assessment checklists with rating scales
5. Encourage reflection: "What was one thing that was helpful for you as you worked toward your goal?"

The ultimate goal is that students independently create their own goals, self-monitor, and reflect — building the self-regulation skills they need.

The Systems Challenge: What Leaders Must Understand

Let's be honest, implementing MTSS at the secondary level is enormously challenging from a systems perspective. Secondary school structures create significant barriers:

- Scheduling: It's difficult to move students between intervention groups because of rigid class schedules. Many schools place students in interventions for an entire semester with limited flexibility.
- Staffing: Limited staffing resources make it hard to provide the small group instruction Tiers 2 and 3 require.
- Movement between tiers: Despite being an essential element of MTSS, moving students across tiers mid-semester feels overwhelming, but some schools have found success with flexible block scheduling.
- Limited guidance: State and local policies typically provide minimal direction for secondary MTSS implementation.

Schools that do this well use student performance data to guide movement between tiers, take advantage of screening data and state test scores to identify students before the year begins, and invest in the collaborative planning structures that make it work.

In summary, intensive interventions alone typically produce only modest improvements in generalized reading comprehension for older students. A comprehensive MTSS approach that can improve student outcomes does the following:

- Tier 1 content-area instruction integrates vocabulary and comprehension strategy instruction for ALL students

- Tier 2 adds targeted multisyllable word reading and fluency instruction with increased explicitness

- Tier 3 addresses foundational word reading skills with maximum intensity and individualization

- Motivation and behavioral challenges are proactively addressed at every tier

- Co-teaching and collaborative planning between content area teachers, intensive intervention teachers, and special education teachers is truly collaborative

- Leaders build scheduling, staffing, and planning structures that make tiered instruction possible

- Data drives decisions about what to teach, how to teach it, and when to adjust

This is extremely difficult to do, and very few places are actually doing it, but it's what our students with reading difficulties deserve and it's what the evidence tells us works.

Article here:https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11323112/pdf/nihms-1851564.pdf

Full citation: Capin, P., Hall, C., Stevens, E. A., Steinle, P. K., & Murray, C. S. (2024). Evidence-based reading instruction for secondary students with reading difficulties within multitiered systems of support. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 56(5), 370–385.

*Screenshots of the lesson plan figures, vocabulary graphic organizer, gist strategy cue card, and practitioner resource table from the article are included below.

The Reading League FL

06/07/2026

05/09/2026

04/27/2026

04/22/2026

04/17/2026

03/29/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category