Effective Instruction

High quality teaching is foundational to successful implementation of Pennsylvania's Response to Intervention strategy.   Teachers deliver high quality, research-based instruction responsive to student needs and informed by ongoing progress monitoring and benchmark assessment.

Tier 1- Foundation provides all students with standards aligned instruction, differentiated to meet the needs of diverse learners. Effective instructional design and delivery represent the "how" of teaching and are critical to both academic achievement and appropriate student behavior.   Effective instruction also helps ensure that core programs are delivered with fidelity.   Regular screening and assessment guide instruction and identify students at risk of not meeting achievement benchmarks.

At Tiers 2 and 3, students continue to participate in the core instructional program and receive additional instruction with supplemental or intervention materials.   Teachers employ the same principals of instructional design and delivery with a few notable differences:   Time and intensity are increased, so that students may work in smaller groups, in frequent sessions, with additional opportunities for practice, responses and correction.   Progress monitoring occurs more frequently, so that data-based decisions are made without losing precious instructional time.   Research indicates that with sufficiently effective instruction and interventions, students with skill deficits can achieve growth rates comparable to their regular classroom peers.

Important elements of effective instruction at all three tiers include:

• The use of research-proven principles to design and deliver instruction. Examples of the ten effective teaching principles include:
• Students learn more when they are engaged actively during an instructional task.
• High and moderate success rates correlate positively with student learning outcomes. A student's rate of success on a task is an important instructional variable.
• Students can become independent, self-regulated learners through instruction that is deliberately and carefully scaffolded.   Scaffolding is characterized by teacher dialogue, questioning, feedback, and error correction, and is especially important to help students learn new or complex tasks.
• Direct and explicit instruction includes statement of instructional goals, objectives, content, and expectations.   An example of effective instructional design is an "I Do, We Do, You Do" design. In this format, the teacher models (teaches)   a skill or content, provides ample guided practice and feedback to ensure a high success rate, and provides independent practice only when monitoring indicates that students have sufficient skill to work independently.  
• Strategic instruction is essential to teaching students "how to learn" effectively. Good strategic instruction results in students personalizing and adapting strategies and knowing when, where and how to use them.   Some researchers refer to this as "conspicuous strategy instruction.
• The assessment of student learning needs and readiness in order to differentiate instruction in any of three ways:
• Differentiation of content (the "what and how" students will learn , e.g., facts, concepts, principles, skills)
• Differentiation of process (instructional activities designed to help students make sense of the content)
• Differentiation of product (student outcomes, or vehicle through which a student shows what he understands and can do as a result of learning)

 Refer to the Effective Instruction section of the PaTTAN website for additional tools and strategies which will support teachers and administrators in successful implementation of an RtI model.