Your child is in a reading intervention group

A reading intervention group is extra reading teaching in a small group, on top of your child’s regular class, aimed at up to three specific early reading skills. A practice guide from the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences describes these groups as meeting three to five times a week for 20-40 minutes. Schools that follow it offer the group to every child who scores below a screening cut-off, so a place in one is a routine step, not a diagnosis.

If the school’s letter said RTI (response to intervention) or MTSS (a multi-tiered system of supports), that is the name of the system, and the reading group is its second level, called Tier 2.

This guide covers what the group is, how it differs from class, what the tiers mean, what your child will work on, how the school decides when the group ends, whether it leads to special education, what to ask, and how to help at home.

What does it mean when my child is put in a reading intervention group?

A reading intervention group means your child gets more teaching, on fewer skills, than the class gets, for as long as the school’s progress checks say it is needed. The IES practice guide recommends groups of three to four children who need the same skill, and it calls the teaching “intensive, systematic instruction on up to three foundational reading skills.”

Children join on a screening result. The guide recommends screening every child at the beginning of the year and again in the middle, and giving the group to children who score below the benchmark or make weak progress in regular class. No evaluation and no eligibility decision comes first, which is the practical difference between a reading group and special education.

Who runs the group varies. It can be a reading specialist (a role also called reading interventionist), a classroom teacher, or a teaching assistant. The guide is direct that this matters less than the method: “It is not important whether a certified teacher or a paraprofessional provides the instruction. But instruction should be systematic, highly explicit, and highly interactive.”

Being placed is normal. The IES guide’s model screens every child twice a year and offers the group to each one below the benchmark, so reading groups are a standing part of the school year rather than an exception made for your child.

How is a reading intervention different from regular reading class?

A reading intervention adds to regular reading class rather than replacing it: the same kind of teaching, in a smaller group, more often, on fewer skills. The IES practice guide says so in one sentence: “In addition to general classroom instruction, tier 2 students receive supplemental, small group reading instruction aimed at building foundational reading skills.”

The comparison below is drawn from the IES practice guide’s recommendations for Tier 1 (the class) and Tier 2 (the group).

	Regular reading class (Tier 1)	Intervention group (Tier 2)
Who	The whole class	A small group, three to four children who need the same skill
How often	The class’s usual reading lessons	Three to five extra sessions a week
How long	The school’s reading block	20-40 minutes a session
What	Every part of reading, adjusted to reading levels	Up to three foundational skills at a time
How	Teaching for everyone	Systematic, highly explicit, and highly interactive

This is the best-supported part of the whole system. The guide grades each of its five recommendations on the strength of the research behind it, and the small-group recommendation is the only one rated “strong”, its highest level.

Ask when the group meets. The guidance says the group comes on top of class. Your school can tell you whether it does, or whether it replaces part of another lesson.

What are RTI and MTSS, and what do Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 mean?

RTI (response to intervention) and MTSS (a multi-tiered system of supports) are the names schools use for teaching in levels, where children who need more help get more intensive teaching. The national Center on MTSS, run by the American Institutes for Research, defines MTSS as “a proactive and preventative framework that integrates data and instruction.” It names four parts: screening every child, levels of teaching, progress checks, and decisions made from the results.

The three tiers, from the Center on MTSS’s tier definitions and the IES practice guide:

Tier	Who gets it	What it looks like
Tier 1	Every child	Regular classroom reading teaching, “designed to meet the needs of all students”
Tier 2	Children below the benchmark on screening	”Small group, standardized interventions”, three to five times a week
Tier 3	Children not responding to Tier 2	Teaching “intensified and individualized based on student need”, with one-on-one teaching part of each day in the IES guide

A child moves from Tier 1 to Tier 2 on a screening result. DIBELS is one screener schools use for this, and our guide to what DIBELS measures explains its scores. Others include the computer-adaptive i-Ready Diagnostic and NWEA’s MAP Growth. Some districts run more than three tiers, which the IES guide notes.

Tier 3 is the least researched level. The IES panel is candid about it: “Tier 3 intervention is the most ambiguous component of RtI, and we did not find research on valid programs or processes.” If your child is moved to Tier 3, the label tells you less than the plan does, so ask what will change: the group size, the time, or the skill.

MTSS versus RTI

RTI covers academic skills, and MTSS is the wider framework that can contain it. Understood, the US nonprofit for learning differences, puts it this way: “RTI only focuses on academic needs,” while “MTSS is a broader, ‘umbrella’ term” that “goes beyond academics to include emotional and behavioral supports.” For a parent whose child is in a reading group, the group itself works the same way under either name.

What will my child work on in the intervention group?

An intervention group works on up to three foundational reading skills at a time, chosen from what the screening showed. Foundational skills are the early layers that reading is built on:

• Hearing the separate sounds in spoken words, called phonemic awareness: hearing the sounds in words
• Matching letters to their sounds: teaching the alphabet and letter sounds
• Sounding out and blending a written word: when a child knows letter sounds but cannot sound out words
• Reading common words on sight: how to teach sight words
• Reading smoothly and accurately, called fluency

Good intervention teaches these in a set order, explicitly, with plenty of practice. The IES guide asks for “intensive, systematic instruction”, which means each skill builds on the last rather than being picked at random. The order the skills come in is set out in what order to teach phonics, and the research behind explicit phonics teaching is in our plain-English guide to the science of reading. The guide also warns against a group that drills sounds alone: interventions “must not focus only on phonemic awareness, decoding, and fluent reading” but “should also include vocabulary and comprehension components.”

You do not need to know the name of the program. What tells you it is a good one is what you can see: a named skill, a set order, the teacher showing the skill before the children try it, many short practice turns with correction, and a regular check on progress.

If the school has not said which skill the group is on, our five-minute reading check-in names the first skill that is shaky.

How will we know the intervention is working, and how long does Tier 2 last?

There is no fixed length for Tier 2. The school decides from progress checks, and the IES practice guide sets the rhythm for those decisions. Its panel suggests running Tier 2 “for at least five weeks to discern which students may need further intervention”, and adds that “after five weeks, some students may have caught up.” It asks schools to check each child’s progress in the group at least once a month, at least eight times during the school year, and to regroup children “approximately every six weeks” as their skills change.

A progress check is a short test of the skill the group is teaching, repeated so the school sees a line of results rather than a single score.

What the progress checks show	What follows
The skill has caught up	Back to Tier 1, with progress still checked, which the IES guide asks for
Progress, but not enough yet	Another round of Tier 2, regrouped or adjusted
Little or no progress after a reasonable time	Tier 3, more intensive and individual teaching

If your child stays in Tier 2 longer than you expected, the question is what the data shows. Either the skill has not yet moved enough on the measure, or the group is not the right fit. The IES guide says a lack of progress is a reason to look at the teaching as well as the child: when no one in a group is improving, “take a careful look at the tier 2 intervention”, because “it may be missing critical components or moving too fast for the students in tier 2 to master the target skills.”

If the group has not moved your child and you are weighing help outside school, how to choose reading help for a struggling reader compares tutors, home programs and apps.

Does a reading intervention group lead to special education?

No, not by itself. A reading intervention group is extra teaching that any child below the screening benchmark can get, with no evaluation first. The two connect in three specific ways:

• A child who does not respond to Tier 2 and Tier 3 may be referred for an evaluation. The IES guide says that children who still struggle after intensive help “are evaluated for possible special education services”, and the federal special education regulations let a child’s response to research-based intervention count as evidence in deciding whether they have a specific learning disability, at 34 CFR 300.307(a)(2).
• The group cannot be used to hold an evaluation up. The US Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs said in memo 11-07, in 2011, that an RTI process cannot be used to delay or deny an evaluation. A parent may ask for one at any time, and our guide to how to ask for an evaluation explains how the request works.
• A disability does not take a child out of the tiers. The Center on MTSS describes Tier 3 as serving children “with severe and persistent learning needs, including students with disabilities.”

If an evaluation does happen, our guide to the signs of dyslexia covers what an evaluation finds and what support looks like after it, including IEPs and 504 plans.

What should the school tell me, and what should I ask?

Ask about the group your child is already in: the skills, the schedule, the measure, and the next decision. General questions about a reading concern are covered by the five questions about the plan for parents who have just heard their child is behind. These six need a child already in a group:

• Which skills is the group working on right now?
• How many children are in it, how often does it meet, and for how long each time?
• Is it extra time, or does it replace part of class reading?
• Which measure are you using to check progress, and can I see each result?
• When will you next decide whether to continue, change, or stop it?
• What are the words or sounds this week, so we can practice the same ones at home?

Ask to see every progress result. If the school later uses the group’s data in a special education evaluation for a learning disability, the federal regulations require the record to show that the progress results were provided to the parents (34 CFR 300.309(b)(2)), and that parents were told about the data being collected and of their right to request an evaluation (34 CFR 300.311(a)(7)(ii)). Asking for each result as it comes in means you see the same data the school would rely on.

The six questions above are about the group. For a parent-teacher conference, the full list of conference questions about reading covers where your child is, how reading is taught, and what happens next.

How can I help at home without repeating the group’s lesson?

The group is already the extra teaching, so home works best as short practice on the same skills, not a second lesson in a different method. The teacher’s method is the one the progress checks measure, so practicing it the same way keeps home and school pulling in one direction.

Ask for this week’s words or sounds and practice those. Ten minutes on most days is easier to keep up than a long session on the weekend. Keep it to the material the group is on, and let your child show you what they did that day. If the group uses a program such as Lexia, i-Ready, or Boost Reading, the guide to school reading programs at home covers using it at home and what else to practice.

Read together for enjoyment as well. Story time should stay separate from practice, so your child keeps one part of reading with no test in it.

Do not quiz. A child who is pulled out for extra help already knows reading is hard work, so home practice should not feel like another test. Our guide to teaching reading at home covers the full method, and if practice has already turned into a battle, what to do when your child resists reading practice starts with whether the words are simply too hard.

If you practice every day and nothing moves, why a child is not improving despite daily practice covers what to change in the practice.

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This page explains how US schools commonly run reading intervention and is not a substitute for your school’s own plan. Practice varies by state and district; your child’s teacher can tell you what applies to them.