By Brooklin Trover
Most educators recognize the familiar RTI triangle with its red, yellow, and green sections because it appears on many instructional resources. Yet the symbol’s ubiquity hasn’t helped teachers fully understand its purpose. Worse, those three colors have led some to sort students into fixed groups and to teach three static “levels” instead of responding to students’ real needs.
As schools move forward into recovery and focus on accelerating learning, it’s time to move beyond static tiers and adopt a responsive model that centers on students, not colors; on learners, not levels; and on instructional opportunities, not fixed categories. Improving intervention effectiveness while addressing unfinished learning, closing proficiency gaps, and boosting growth for every student requires a more responsive approach to RTI and MTSS.
Below are adapted excerpts from the piece titled Putting the ‘Response’ Back in Response to Intervention, highlighting practical steps educators can take to implement responsive RTI in their classrooms.
Essential Components of Intervention
A strong RTI/MTSS framework depends on three interdependent components: screening, high-quality instruction, and progress monitoring. When these elements work together, they reveal each student’s domain-specific strengths and needs and guide instruction. Viewing each component through a reflective, improvement-focused lens helps teams transition from static systems to responsive practices.
Screening
Screening typically identifies students who may need Tier 1, 2, or 3 instruction. Many schools rely on norm-referenced measures—percentile ranks that compare students across a broad population—and then place students into groups based on those norms. This “bucketing” approach classifies students relative to peers but often fails to connect assessment results to the specific growth needed for grade-level proficiency.
A responsive screening process uses high-quality, criterion-referenced measures that provide actionable, domain-specific information about what each student knows and can do. Adaptive, criterion-based screeners that adjust to a student’s responses during administration give more precise insights and produce data educators can use immediately to plan instruction and interventions tailored to grade-level standards.
Instruction
Meeting the needs of all learners in a single classroom is one of the most demanding parts of teaching. It’s tempting to simplify planning by sorting students into three groups labeled by color, but fixed grouping does not capture the changing and specific needs of individual learners. Responsive instruction treats tiers as fluid, tied to the upcoming content and the most recent, content-specific data.
To adopt a truly responsive instructional model, educators should commit to two core practices:
1. Deliver high-quality, differentiated grade-level instruction (Tier 1) to all students, using scaffolds and enrichment as needed.
Every student should have regular access to grade-level content and the cognitive work that accompanies it. When students who are behind are routinely taught below grade level, they miss essential opportunities to build background knowledge and grade-appropriate skills, widening achievement gaps over time. Instead, teachers should provide grade-level tasks with supports—teacher modeling, graphic organizers, explicit pre-teaching of text structure and vocabulary, and strategic scaffolds—that make content accessible while preserving the rigor needed for growth.
These scaffolds enable students to engage with complex material and develop the academic thinking expected at their grade, which accelerates learning and narrows gaps more effectively than prolonged remediation on lower-level materials.
2. Offer targeted, flexible intervention (Tiers 2 and 3) based on specific, prioritized student needs, increasing focus, coherence, and intensity where required.
As Tier 1 instruction is delivered to all students, criterion-based data tied to current instructional content should guide decisions about who needs additional support. Students who are close to proficiency benefit from Tier 2 interventions that are tightly aligned to grade-level instruction and designed to bridge a specific skill gap. These precisely targeted interventions are coherent with classroom learning and often move students toward grade-level success quickly.
Students farther from proficiency need Tier 3 instruction that is more intensive and explicit. While Tier 3 should be connected to the same content trajectory, it often takes a different form—short-term, concentrated instruction that addresses foundational deficits so students can re-engage with grade-level material. Effective Tier 3 supports should not replace Tier 1 exposure but rather supplement it so students continue to access rich classroom learning.
Progress Monitoring
Educators constantly balance assessment time with instruction time. In an RTI/MTSS framework, progress monitoring serves two essential purposes. First, it evaluates whether interventions are producing the intended growth and signals when instruction needs to be adjusted. For example, progress data may show that a student responding well to a focused vocabulary intervention is ready to transition back to less-intensive supports, or that a student participating in Tier 1 geometry needs a short-term small group to prepare for an upcoming unit.
Purposeful progress monitoring embeds periodic adjustments across tiers and keeps instruction responsive. Second, regular monitoring creates shared data for teams, teachers, students, and families to track progress, coordinate next steps, and celebrate growth. At the school level, teams can use monitoring data to share effective strategies and align interventions across classrooms.
Reach for Responsiveness
Student growth and movement toward proficiency occur when teachers apply effective screening, deliver high-quality grade-level instruction, and use progress monitoring to reveal and address domain-specific needs. It is time to replace a rigid intervention triangle with a more fluid, evidence-informed model that recognizes students as individuals with varying assets and needs.
Rather than labeling students by color or level, use targeted screening to surface specific instructional gaps, provide grade-level learning with appropriate scaffolds, and implement focused interventions that align with classroom content. Regular progress monitoring ensures instruction remains responsive and timely. This approach is achievable, but it requires a deliberate shift away from predictable, fixed grouping toward a responsive RTI system centered on student growth.
Additional Resources
“The Opportunity Myth: What Students Can Show Us About How School Is Letting Them Down—and How to Fix It” (TNTP)
Response to Intervention (RTI) and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) — overview and guidance from curriculum and assessment experts
About the author
Brooklin Trover is a national director of content and implementation at Curriculum Associates. She spent 13 years as an elementary and middle school teacher and later served five years in district leadership supporting teacher development and student growth. Brooklin focuses on making data-driven instruction more human-centered, helping teachers translate assessment into meaningful, actionable practice. She holds an M.A. in Policy Studies of Language, Literacy, and Culture from San Diego State University and an M.S. in Reading from California State University, Fullerton.
This article was originally published by The Learning Counsel, a research institute and news media hub focused on the digital shift in curriculum and instruction.