Looking for an intervention for your students? The Intervention Tools Chart is designed to be used by educators as a resource to locate interventions, instructional practices, and learning strategies that can be used within an RtI process. Please note: the listing of specific tools is not meant as an endorsement by the NYS RtI MS DP or the NYSED. Rather, it is up to the consumer to research selected tools for evidence of effectiveness. The chart contains three types of tools that are either free or available for purchase: commercial programs, instructional practices, and learning strategies.
Close Thinking is a strategy for complex texts that develops the students’ understanding through multiple opportunities to hear the same text. It is based on the thinking that each time the student hears the text, something new is discovered. Each time a student hears a short, complex text read aloud to them, the level of thinking becomes more in depth allowing the student to grasp the reading better and better each time. Teachers must scaffold this strategy to engage the students in a deep dive of the text and influential discussion.
The Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) strategy incorporates cooperative learning, vocabulary development, questioning techniques, opportunities to practice, and students’ use of prior knowledge. As a multi-component reading strategy, its success is based on use of all four of the following components each time students read Preview, Get the Gist, Click or Clunk?, and Wrap Up. CSR was designed to be used with expository text, but can be adapted for other text.
Preview is one fourth of CSR, a learning strategy shown to improve students’ reading comprehension when all four parts of CSR are used by students. The role of Preview within CSR is for students to think about what they already know about the topic of the text and to make predictions about the text using features such as titles, subtitles, graphs, illustrations , and other text cues.
Get the Gist is one fourth of Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), a learning strategy shown to improve students’ reading comprehension when all four parts of CSR are used by students. The role of Get the Gist within CSR is to aid students in identifying the main ideas as they read. This increases the likelihood that they will understand what they are reading.
According to extensive research on CSR, Get the Gist must be implemented as part of the CSR strategy if positive effects are to be achieved.
This strategy can be used as part of the Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) reading strategy.
Click or Clunk? is a self-checking learning strategy comprehension. Clicks are sections of the text that make sense to the reader; comprehension “clicks.” Clunks can be word(s), idea(s), or concept(s) that do not make sense to the reader; comprehension “breaks down.” Using this strategy, students periodically check their understanding of sentences, paragraphs, and pages of text for “clicks” and “clunks” as they read. If they encounter problems with vocabulary or comprehension, they use a checklist to apply simple strategies to solve those reading difficulties.
The Sticky Notes Bookmark strategy engages student in the reading actively as they must identify four different aspects of the text being read. They must identify an interesting part of the book (!), a part of the book that has a vocabulary word that they would like to discuss deeper (V), a part that is confusing (?), and lastly a part that identifies an illustration, map or graph to help the reader understand the text (graph). Students using this strategy read with preconceived questions and markers to identify.
Text Annotation is a strategy that allows students to take ownership of what they are reading by writing notes, symbols, bullet points, circles, underlining, and any other written feature that helps them comprehend the text. It can be used across content areas and couple with other strategies. Text Annotation allows students to create a record of their thoughts throughout a reading.
Text Structures such as sequence/order, compare-contrast, and cause-effect can be crucial to comprehending a passage, and graphic organizers help students to identify these text structures visually and structurally. This allows the student to understand what the author is saying by identifying how the author is saying it.
Text-Based Questions are questions that must be answered only by reading through a text. They are designed to engage the students after a reading and encourages higher level thinking from literal comprehension to critical thinking or inferential comprehension.