Flooding the zone to help students succeed
While readjusting to life in the classroom after the COVID shutdown, Triad Elementary is focused on student growth and intervention.
Using ESSER funds that were provided to all districts last year, Triad hired additional staff members to provide small group intervention to students at Triad Elementary. This team is known as the “Flood” team because they flood into the grade levels to provide intervention.
All six teachers go to one grade level for an hour at a time and work with small groups, made up of any students with needs, on skills they need to improve on.
The great thing about this intervention is that it is in addition to classroom instruction. Students are receiving grade level instruction and with this intervention, are also closing the gaps in deficit areas.
Specific intervention programs are being used to target deficits in areas of reading, including phonics, phonological awareness and comprehension.
These teachers have participated in many hours of professional development training and continue to meet weekly to discuss interventions, instruction, data and needs of students. Their groups are fluid and as students grow and their needs change, their interventions and groups can change as well.
Being able to provide the time and personnel to implement these interventions is one of the biggest hurdles districts face, and because that is happening, growth is occurring. There are three levels, or tiers, of instruction: tier 1-instruction in the whole group setting, tier 2-an additional amount of instruction/intervention to address specific deficits, tier 3-an additional amount, beyond tier 2, of instruction/ intervention.
The district measures growth on benchmark assessments that are administered three times per year in reading. By looking at the percentage of students who fall in each tier, overall growth can be measured. In the fall, Triad Elementary had 29% of students in tier 1, 40% in tier 2, and 31% in tier 3. For the winter benchmark, these numbers improved to 48% of students at tier 1, 32% at tier 2, and 20% at tier 3.
The gains are observed in all grade levels, but especially in the kindergarten, first-grade and second-grade levels, which are the foundational years of reading instruction. End of the year data will be collected prior to the end of the school year to fully assess the growth in these areas over the 20212022 school year.
It is the hope that these gains continue and over the next few years this level of intense intervention can be phased out, with a majority of elementary students continuing to show appropriate growth with tier 1 support.
Until then, Triad Elementary thanks the Flood team for continuing to provide students with the appropriate and necessary support and interventions to help them succeed.