Intensifying Interventions for Students by Identifying and Remediating Conceptual Understandings in Mathematics
Mr. Powers, an elementary school special education teacher and interventionist, is deep in thought as he walks from his classroom. He just finished the 10th lesson of the school's intervention curriculum unit focused on fractions and beginning fraction operations with a group of elementary students. The intensified small group lessons include opportunities for students to work with concrete, pictorial, and symbolic models of unit fractions (e.g. one third, one fourth, one fifth) and nonunit fractions (e.g. two fifths, three fourths) as the teacher models and talks aloud procedures for addition and subtraction when the denominators are the same. From the student results on the biweekly progress monitoring assessments, he sees the improvements in student learning for most of the students who receive intervention services for the struggling students who were receiving Tier 2 interventions using the school district's intervention curriculum. The students were so engaged in their learning, especially in the small groups, because the instruction and resources were scaffolded to meet their learning needs and included manipulatives to develop conceptual understanding. Charting the students' progress from the curriculumbased assessments included in the curriculum resources has been a visual reminder of their learning. Although most show improvement, three students were not meeting criteria for mastery. Mr. Powers is concerned with their continued difficulty with the content and decides to work with them one on one in an effort to improve performance. He wants to ensure the students are learning fraction concepts aligned with grade level and Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSS M) Yet, like other general and special education teachers in his building, Mr. Powers wonders how he can support understanding and use of content and practice standards embodied in the CCSS M while attending to students' unique strengths and weaknesses. Because three of the students are not mastering the standards through use of the standard protocol intervention curriculum alone, Mr. Powers is not sure what to try next.