The Interventions We Need

Trigger warning: education consultants read with caution

This post is specific to what I’ve experienced in the U.S. I’ll leave it as an exercise to international readers to think about how these ideas might apply in your context.

I work in a relatively low-achieving school. It’s not the toughest school in the world, but the test scores are low, and we are a revolving door of consultants who come in and tell us what to do.

One theme you’ll often hear from these types of consultants: they want teachers to give students more challenging work. Read tougher texts. Give students less support. Let them struggle. Increase the rigor. Grade-level work, every day.

And something you’ll hear from teachers in schools like mine is that our students are, on average, well behind grade level. Shouldn’t we try to meet them where they are, to support them with the skills they need help with, not just throw grade-level rigor at them and hope it sticks?

It’s like an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. This story plays out over and over again in schools across the country. Nothing much changes, though the consultants make a fair bit of money. There’s an army of these people, thousands strong. To be clear, there are some good consultants out there.¹ But they are far outnumbered by people who only know how to tell teachers to raise the rigor. Many left teaching when they realized they could make more money for easier work, and they go from low-performing school to low-performing school with the same message. They each have their own brand and their own slide deck, but it’s the same idea. Each consultant will toss something else in to make it sound unique. Maybe they suggest doing more turn and talks but call them “student to student discourse.” And then the consultant reminds teachers that “students can do hard things” and emphasizes that if we all believe our students can achieve, they will achieve.²

Exposure Teaching

Here’s an important property of learning: there will always be some students who learn more or less by being exposed to the content. For these students, the quality of teaching doesn’t matter too much. As long as we do a decent job exposing students to the curriculum, some will learn.

Every student eventually hits a wall where they no longer learn by exposure and need more structured and systematic teaching. Motivation matters here too: motivated students will be able to push on for longer. Others will be taught by their parents at the kitchen table as they struggle through their homework.³

If you understand teaching by exposure, the consultants start to make a lot of sense. They don’t know the answer. They don’t know how to support students who are behind and struggling in school. But every school has a wide range of achievement, and in low-performing schools there is a natural tendency to make the work easier to accommodate students who are struggling. If the consultant can convince teachers not to do that, to expose students to more challenging work, they can nudge up the test scores just by exposing the top students to more rigor. This will leave the struggling students even further behind, but the key metric in these schools is often the number of students who are proficient on the state test. That number can move a bit because of an increase in rigor alone.

Teachers will fight this, of course. This is where the unstoppable force meets the immovable object. The consultants are wrong: we shouldn’t just raise the rigor and toss in some turn and talks. But the common instinct from teachers, to go a little slower, to make things a bit easier, isn’t a great solution either.

A Different Mental Model

If a third grade teacher has a bunch of students who can’t read, they probably wouldn’t get this whole “give them harder work” treatment. Giving those students tougher texts and using more turn and talks isn’t going to cut it.

Instead, most schools would assess the students to see if the issue lies in their decoding skills. If the issue is decoding, well, lucky for us we have this intervention we call phonics. It’s not perfect, but phonics is the best tool we have to teach students how to decode written language. From here the school might increase phonics instruction or establish a phonics intervention program. We can feel reasonably confident that phonics will help.⁴ Of course, not all students need phonics. Some students learn to read through exposure, or are motivated to figure it out on their own, or get help from their parents at the kitchen table. Phonics is “helpful for all, harmful for none, crucial for some.”

I’m a seventh grade math teacher. According to the standards, students are done learning fractions skills by the time they arrive in my classroom. As any seventh grade teacher will tell you, plenty of students arrive needing more work on their fractions skills. So what do we do? There’s no obvious solution, no equivalent of phonics for fractions.

So teachers end up improvising. We reduce the difficulty of seventh grade math a bit so it’s manageable for students who struggle with fractions. We scaffold and reteach where we can, though it tends to be piecemeal and progress is slow. I’m not saying this is good — it’s a jury-rigged solution from teachers who are being told that if only they increased the rigor and used more turn and talks students would magically learn fractions.

The ideal solutions are rooted in content. The army of consultants wants to come in with generic solutions that they can provide to all teachers, generic solutions like higher rigor or turn and talks or believing in students. Phonics is different: it’s an approach to teaching rooted in an analysis of the content that we want students to learn, and teaching methods specific to that content. That’s what we need more of: content-specific interventions.⁵ What specific skills and concepts are students struggling with? And what teaching strategies will help students with that specific content?

What Do I Do?

I don’t have all the answers for this. The point of this post is that education in the U.S. feels like it’s at a bit of a crossroads. In one direction are the consultants with their colorful slides, telling us we need more rigor and more exposure. In the other direction…well there’s a lot of work to do. We have phonics as an intervention for decoding. That’s great. We need serious interventions for about a dozen other areas just to get students successfully through math and reading in middle school. I am a) confident that these interventions exist, and b) confident that identifying and scaling them is hard work.

We already have reasonable candidates. I wrote last week about The Writing Revolution, a fantastic approach to teaching writing. We don’t have solid evidence right now that the approach described in The Writing Revolution is a reliable intervention that works at scale, but it’s possible we will get there. That would be great! We could check another topic off the list: strategies in The Writing Revolution could be an effective intervention for early writing skills.

The best fractions materials I’ve found are in the JUMP curriculum. One nice thing about the JUMP materials is that they include lots of strategic review of fractions skills throughout each year of the program.⁶ I’ve pieced together a parallel fractions curriculum from the JUMP program that I’m teaching alongside my seventh grade standards during an extra support math block. I teach all of my seventh grade standards, while also aiming to teach students as many fractions skills as I can get through.

I have no evidence my approach works. This year is the first I’ve fully committed to this fractions sequence — I’ve done it in bits and pieces in the past, but those bits and pieces haven’t been enough to make a difference. My point is not that I’m right and everyone should copy me. My point is that we need this type of experimentation, to find more interventions that can scale.

High Quality Instructional Materials

Here’s the ideal I’m describing: teach a rigorous, grade-level curriculum, assess students to identify gaps, and supplement the curriculum with interventions, additional instruction, and practice to address those gaps.

This approach sounds completely boring and obvious when I say it like that. The issue is, education in the U.S. is moving in the opposite direction. I use phonics as an example because it’s the only place where a content-specific intervention has become well-known and accepted as the best tool we have. We have lots of other candidates, but nothing else has gained the same traction.

Meanwhile we are in the thick of the “High Quality Instructional Materials” (HQIM) movement. The definition of HQIM is a bit slippery, but for all practical purposes most districts define HQIM as “got an all-green score on EdReports.” EdReports is a website that evaluates curricula. Their reports have become the most important gatekeeper in many districts. The process is simple. Step one: only consider curricula that have the EdReports stamp of approval. Step two: from that list, pick the one you like best.

I have nothing against adopting high-quality curriculum. The issue is that EdReports rates curricula primarily based on whether they align with standards. It’s that grade-level rigor approach again. The review has nothing to do with “quality” as we might use that word colloquially, as in “this curriculum has been proven to maximize learning.” But we call them High Quality Instructional Materials, districts invest a ton of money in the process (often hiring consultants to help choose a curriculum⁷), and more and more they want to see teachers following that fancy curriculum “with fidelity.”

Where To From Here?

I would love to be optimistic. I’m painting with a broad brush in this post. When I talk to teachers around the country, what I’m describing is absolutely the norm in low-performing schools. Too many schools mistake exposure to grade-level rigor for quality instruction, and generic pedagogy for content-specific intervention. That’s the conflict between the unstoppable force and the immovable object. But there are plenty of exceptions, places where schools are using assessment to identify gaps and adopting or building content-specific interventions to address those gaps.

The one constant in education in the U.S. is that we prefer fads and slogans over the substance of teaching and learning. The progress with phonics in the last few years has been impressive. At the same time, we need to remember that phonics is an intervention for one aspect of early reading: decoding. Phonics isn’t a miracle drug that causes every student to learn to read perfectly. That lesson has been lost on many advocates for the “science of reading,” who focus on phonics at the expense of all the other areas where we need great instruction and effective intervention.

It would be great if we said, “Hey we’ve found an effective intervention for decoding. That’s great! Let’s be clear-eyed about what phonics does and doesn’t help with, and find more interventions for different content areas that can scale.” Unfortunately, that’s not what’s happening.

So we’ll see. I’ll keep plugging away in my classroom, trying to figure this stuff out for my students and my context. I’ll keep my head down and hope no one makes a fuss that I’m using Low Quality Instructional Materials to teach students fractions. I’ll keep making slow and steady progress. I’ll ignore the consultants, scour the internet for folks doing thoughtful work that helps me with the challenges in my classroom each day, and hope that this “curriculum fidelity” fad passes.

1. I realize this is a bit harsh toward consultants. I know plenty of consultants who are great. Some of you read this Substack! But empirically, in the real world, the reality is that most consultants don’t know what they’re doing. We don’t have a nice way to take a random sample of these people but if you go to regular schools and talk to regular teachers you will hear how out of touch the vast majority of consultants are.

2. There’s a clear implication here: since our students aren’t achieving, we must not believe in them enough. This drives me crazy. There’s a Hattie meta-analysis that these consultants absolutely love to cite. The effect size for “collective teacher efficacy” is huge. Students who have teachers that believe in them learn far more.

No one considers that this maybe the causal arrow goes the other way. Maybe it’s harder to believe in students when you work in a low-achieving school with a revolving door of consultants who don’t know how to help. Maybe teachers who work in high-performing schools believe in their students as a result of their students’ high achievement. I’m not saying that teacher belief in student doesn’t matter, but it sure is hard to change. I’d prefer to show teachers that their students can achieve through effective interventions. That’s much more likely to cause a change than having yet another consultant tell teachers to believe their students can achieve (and by implication, they aren’t achieving because teachers don’t believe enough).

3. When you look closely, a lot of teaching approaches boil down to two things: expose students to challenging content, and find some clever ways to motivate students to persevere. And this can work, in the sense that it can be better than exposing students to challenging content with less motivation. But for the students it leaves behind, they get left very far behind.

4. I’m using the phrase “intervention” imprecisely. Intervention could mean additional instruction provided to a subgroup of students, or whole-class instruction targeted to address specific gaps. It’s tough to separate those two. The same fact fluency intervention could be used with a subgroup of students or in whole-class instruction. Some schools implement a small-group intervention and see so much success that they move that instruction to whole-class.

In the U.S., the MTSS (multi-tiered system of supports) approach to intervention is common. Many people will say that schools should focus on getting to some metric like 80% proficiency before implementing small-group interventions. I don’t agree with that. If a school focuses on generic whole-class solutions they’ll probably never reach 80% proficiency from whole-class instruction. Small-group interventions can be a testing ground to figure out which interventions should be moved to whole-class.

5. I want to note that there is a whole separate set of challenges once you’ve identified content-specific interventions. Where do you find the time? How do you make instructional groups? How do you figure out the right dosage? These aren’t easy questions. But to even get to these questions, you need to start by identifying the content for students to learn and the content-specific intervention.

6. JUMP did not get the coveted all-green rating from EdReports. My guess for the reason why is that they include plenty of review of prior years’ standards. To me this is common sense. Teachers can skip those lessons if they want, but the vast majority of students benefit from a refresher on previous learning. That’s not the HQIM way, though. EdReports wants to see standards alignment, which means a laser focus on grade-level standards.

7. This creates a lot of business for those consultants. Turns out districts don’t like making curriculum decisions themselves. Some teachers will get mad, and someone will have to take the blame. It’s much easier to pay some fancy consultants to come in, send out some surveys, talk about the importance of High Quality Instructional Materials, pick a curriculum, and hightail it out of there. What those consultants won’t say? “Hey, this curriculum is solid, but you should consider supplementing it with some other resources.” Nope. Not allowed. Districts want one program, all-in. And once it’s adopted, more and more they want to make sure teachers are using the fancy new curriculum “with fidelity.”