With the complex range of learning needs found in every classroom, teachers are under pressure to manage that complexity in a way that gives every student an opportunity for academic growth. While this is a heavy lift, one challenge teachers don’t face as they think beyond core instruction is a lack of options. If anything, they’re met with an overwhelming abundance of online resources when searching for lessons, tools, and materials to support interventions and supplemental instruction. Of course, many teachers have already become proficient in using AI to find and develop learning resources, too. Endless possibility, however, comes with its own drawbacks:
Fragmentation:
As teachers spend countless hours searching for “just the right lesson,” students often end up using a collection of fragmented resources of uncertain quality. And when educational tools are used in isolation, there’s a real risk that the learning experience itself becomes disconnected—with an associated impact on achievement, growth, and morale. Supplemental work can feel random rather than purposeful, opportunities to build confidence are missed, and equity issues creep in, with some students getting coherent, connected learning while others receive seemingly unrelated content.
Pressure on teachers:
When teachers bear the burden of devising ways to connect whole-class core instruction with Tier II and Tier III, it’s a recipe for overwhelm and burnout. We know teachers apply great ingenuity in bringing useful tools into the classroom, but when these tools don’t communicate with each other, the result can be inefficiency, duplicated efforts, and frustration.
Uncertain ROI:
For administrators seeking to measure the efficacy of the resource investments they’ve made, a scattershot approach means it’s difficult to get a handle on what’s working and what’s not.
The solution to these challenges lies not just in the number of tools used or where they’re sourced, but rather in the harmonization and connectedness of core instruction with intervention and supplemental learning. In a world of highly diverse learning needs and limits on teachers’ capacity to meet those needs on an individual student basis, the most successful solutions will:
- Balance technology and automation with teacher expertise and intuition
- Generate the highest-quality assessment data and use that data to help ensure students have access to the content they need to meet grade-level expectations and beyond
- Support teachers with integrated, flexible solutions that both unburden them and leave them in control
What might this approach look like in practice? Here are six practical strategies for connecting core instruction to tailored intervention and adaptive practice, along with insights from Mary Resanovich, an NWEA expert on learning assessment content and design and a former elementary education teacher.
1. Use assessment data to create flexible groups for targeted instruction
First, start with high-quality interim assessment data to get an accurate snapshot of where your students are and the areas where they need support to meet grade-level expectations and achieve growth goals. With that data in hand, you can also layer in classroom formative data to pinpoint specific skill gaps, begin creating content-specific learning groups, and track students’ growth over time to gauge the efficacy of your approaches. Learning groups work best when you can easily reconfigure them based on upcoming instruction and students’ evolving ability levels. School leaders have a key role to play in ensuring that teachers have sufficient time to analyze data and get training on flexible grouping practices.
2. Align adaptive practice with upcoming core content
What’s coming tomorrow, next week, and next month in your core instruction? Scanning the horizon will help you ensure that any supplemental work your students are doing is building directly toward what’s coming next. This could include adaptive practice for students who are performing on grade level or ready for acceleration, or tailored intervention for students who are one or more years below grade level. For optimal alignment, keep these best practices in mind:
- Identify the precursor skills students will need for upcoming units, while using supplemental time to ensure that students are grounded in foundational concepts and skills before you challenge them to build on those.
- Engage students in the process. When you reactivate precursor content, ask questions that allow students to recall what they know and make connections to the new content they’re learning. When a student can say something like, “Those exercises we did on repeated addition remind me of what we’re doing now with multiplication,” you’ve given them a confidence boost and helped create a space where students can learn from each other.
- Be mindful of the progression of your academic standards. Whether your students need reinforcement or reteaching of earlier skills or they’re ready for more advanced material, practice assignments should reflect the need to meet the standards that lie ahead.
Supplemental support: A real-world scenario
Imagine you’re a fourth-grade teacher preparing to teach a unit on multiplying fractions by whole numbers. You give students a formative assessment to gauge their understanding of fractions, which shows that some of them would benefit from practice in basic fraction concepts—understanding fractions relative to equally partitioning a whole and iterating the basic unit. This will help students understand that ¾ is 3 iterations of ¼, a conceptual understanding they need in order to multiply whole numbers by fractions. You can also have students review the whole number multiplication concepts of equal groups to help them see 2/6 x 5 as 5 groups of ⅖. This content can be assigned in a supplemental tool, prior to the start of the unit.
As the unit progresses, you might find students who quickly show mastery of the content. You could assign them supplemental content that goes deeper into the concept or integrates it with other grade-level content. For example, students can work on activities where they convert between measurement units involving fractions, such as converting 3 ¼ yards to feet and inches. If other data suggests some students are truly ready for some acceleration, you might look for some above-grade content that both directly builds on the work you’re doing in class and is taught conceptually. That conceptual piece is important, as you don’t want to inadvertently create gaps in conceptual understanding that might cause issues later.
3. Leverage digital tools while preserving teacher autonomy
The best classroom technology solutions blend automation with user control. In this just-right scenario, students take computer-adaptive assessments and are then automatically placed on data-informed personalized learning pathways that engage them at the upper limits of their current ability level. But it's the teachers—not the algorithms—who retain the authority to make the final call on the practice opportunities and interventions students need. They also have a line of sight into the content of that supplemental instruction, so they can make any needed adjustments to ensure the content is relevant to core instruction.
A tech solution should also promote effective progress monitoring by producing data points such as time on task, completion rates, and clear indicators of when students are either breezing through the content or getting stuck.
Automatic placement is great, but teachers should always have that gut-check moment where they compare those recommendations against their own personal knowledge of their students. Maybe a student was distracted on assessment day, or maybe they’re more ready for advanced material than their test data suggests. That’s the teacher’s call to make.
4. Create structured time for cross-tier teacher collaboration
When teachers have the chance to work together across grade levels and intervention tiers, they share and benefit from each other’s expertise much more effectively. The most effective school leaders help promote this practice by ensuring that collaboration time is built into teachers’ schedules—even if it requires creative solutions like early dismissal days. In addition, grade-level teams should be able to count on regular planning time for discussion of intervention strategies.
Consider using an “all hands on deck” approach in both core and supplemental instruction, including specialists and interventions as needed. Everyone has the potential to play a meaningful role, as an Ohio school district learned when it engaged all of its elementary teachers—including at least one PE teacher—in carrying out the district’s reading interventions. That district is now enjoying some of the best reading scores in the nation.
5. Build student agency through reflection and goal setting
Students learn more effectively when they understand the purpose behind their learning experiences and are invited into conversation about those experiences. In addition to showing students that their thoughts are valued, asking them to reflect can produce a goldmine of information that can be used to shape future units and better understand students. See the sidebar for tips on how to engage students in this kind of discussion.
Students also benefit from setting personalized learning goals based on assessment data and their impressions of the supplemental materials they’ve worked with so far. If you know they’ve responded well to adaptive practice exercises or they’ve made good progress building skills through tailored interventions, you can apply these insights to ensure that the placements they receive from an automated solution are still the right ones for them.
6. Design flexible scheduling that serves all learners
Just as learning groups should be designed to shift and adapt as needed, teachers should have the freedom to take a flexible approach to their scheduling and classroom time. With flexibility, core instruction can be continually supplemented with just the right interventions and practice opportunities for the right students, at the right time. This takes a bit of creativity, including these tactics:
- Create shared intervention blocks across grade levels so that students can get intensive support without being isolated. This might require some creative staffing solutions, too. (Remember the Ohio gym teacher who helped raise reading scores?)
- Strategically pair students so they can work on related skills and support each other.
- For leaders: Solicit feedback from teachers about what type of flexible scheduling would work best for their team and group—and make sure teachers have the autonomy and support to put their ideas into practice.
Broad-based benefits for all
When core instruction is successfully brought into alignment with intervention and supplemental instruction, the positive impact can be profound. Teachers can rely less on guesswork, spend less time scouring the web for relevant materials, and enjoy a greater sense of confidence in the connection between assessment data and instructional decisions. Students, meanwhile, become more engaged, more growth-minded, and more aware of how their learning experiences build toward their goals. They feel greater ownership over their learning process. And when students are united in a coherent and equitable learning experience in which they all receive coordinated support, regardless of where they are in their learning journey, they feel a greater sense of belonging.
The benefits of alignment flow to leadership, too. Leaders can expect a better return on investment from an integrated solution than they’d get from a piecemeal approach to instructional resources. And when learning tools are coordinated in one holistic system, leaders are more likely to see not only measurable performance improvement but also happier teachers and less burnout.
In trying to help teachers find instructional materials in less time, I fear we’ve oversimplified things: ‘Here’s a learning pathway—all you have to do is put your kids on it.’ But if we can surface high-quality content for teachers, the time they spent previously looking for content can be redirected to thinking about how to use that content and how to connect it to on-grade learning.
Maximizing impact through student engagement & reflection
When students understand the purpose of their learning tools and feel ownership over their progress, they’re more engaged—and that means better outcomes. To foster this engagement, try embedding moments of reflection into your classroom time to help students internalize learning, recognize growth, and identify areas of confusion. Here are some practical strategies for making this happen:
Ask students questions such as:
- What did you enjoy most or least about the lesson?
- What content was particularly interesting to you?
- What do you want to learn more about now that we’ve finished this lesson?
Prompt students to reflect weekly on questions such as:
- Did you have any “aha!” moments where you felt excited or something became clear?
- What’s still confusing?
- What do you like or dislike about this way of learning?
Use digital journals, exit tickets, or short video reflections to capture insights.
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