Before You Add Intervention: 5 Ways to Make Tier 1 Instruction More Inclusive
When students struggle, our instinct is often to ask what additional support they need.
Do they need small-group instruction? More practice? A supplemental intervention? A different level of support? Sometimes the answer is yes. Within a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), supplemental and intensified supports play an important role in meeting student needs. But before we add intervention, there is another question worth asking:
What can we strengthen about the instruction students are already receiving? Strong Universal (Tier 1) instruction is the foundation of an effective MTSS. It is also one of our most powerful opportunities to make learning more inclusive. As educator and author Catlin Tucker reminds us, “The stronger our Tier 1 instruction, the less likely students are to need Tier 2 support or Tier 3 intervention.” Strengthening Tier 1 is a proactive approach that helps educators respond to learner variability before gaps have an opportunity to grow.
That’s where inclusive practice begins. Inclusive practice asks us to look beyond what a student cannot yet do and examine the learning environment around that student. Instead of immediately asking, What support does this student need? we can ask:
Which parts of our instruction increase access, and which parts may unintentionally create barriers? That shift can change what happens next.
Here are five instructional moves educators and collaborative teams can use to make Tier 1 instruction more inclusive and increase access to grade-level learning for every student.
1. Clarify the Learning
Students are better positioned to succeed when they know what they’re learning and what success looks like. That means every student should be able to answer three questions:
- What am I learning?
- Why am I learning it?
- How will I know when I am successful?
Learning intentions give students a clear destination. Success criteria make the path toward that destination visible.
Without that clarity, students may misinterpret expectations or spend valuable cognitive energy figuring out the task before they can fully engage with the learning. And those challenges do not affect every learner equally.
Students who already know how to “do school” may be able to infer what a teacher wants. Others may not.
Clarity removes that barrier.
This doesn’t mean simply posting a learning intention on the board. Teachers can discuss it, unpack it, connect it to prior learning, show students examples of successful work, and invite students to use success criteria to monitor their own progress.
Before beginning a lesson, ask:
Have I made the learning clear enough that every student knows where we are going and what success looks like?
2. Remove Barriers Before Adding Support
When a student struggles, it is easy to locate the problem in the learner.
- They aren’t reading at grade level.
- They can’t explain their thinking.
- They aren’t engaged.
- They don’t have the background knowledge.
Those observations may tell us something important about student performance, but they don’t necessarily tell us why the student is struggling or what we should do next. Inclusive educators look at the learner and the learning environment. Consider a class in which students are asked to read a complex grade-level text independently and then respond in writing. Some students struggle.
Vocabulary may be getting in the way. Students may need additional background knowledge. The amount of text may be overwhelming. Some students may understand the ideas but have difficulty expressing that understanding in writing. Others may need an opportunity to process the text with a peer.
The answer isn’t automatically to lower the level of the text or move those students into an intervention. First, examine the barriers.
Could vocabulary be previewed? Could the text be chunked? Could students engage in reciprocal teaching or partner talk? Would a visual support, model, or graphic organizer make the thinking more accessible?
The goal is to remove obstacles that are unrelated to the learning we actually want students to demonstrate. That’s why one of the most useful questions a collaborative team can ask is:
What might be getting in the student’s way?
It moves the conversation away from assumptions about students and toward instructional decisions educators can actually change.
3. Scaffold Without Lowering Expectations
Increasing access does not mean decreasing rigor. When students struggle with challenging work, lowering the learning target may seem like a logical response. But doing so can unintentionally reduce their opportunity to engage with grade-level thinking.
Instead, change the support while keeping the destination intact. The support changes. The learning target stays the same.
Scaffolds can take many forms:
- Think-alouds that make an invisible thinking process visible
- Sentence stems that support students in explaining their reasoning
- Visuals and graphic organizers that help students organize information
- Exemplars and models that clarify expectations
- Vocabulary previews that remove language barriers before instruction begins
- Partner talk that gives students time to process and rehearse ideas
- Guided practice before independent work
- Chunking that makes complex tasks more manageable
- Multiple ways for students to demonstrate what they know
The key is intentionality.
A scaffold should address an identified barrier and help a student move toward greater independence. It shouldn’t become a permanent substitute for rigorous learning. Instead of asking, How can I make this easier? ask:
What support would make this learning more accessible without changing what students are expected to learn? That small change in the question helps protect both access and rigor.
4. Respond to Evidence While Learning Is Happening
Assessment is most powerful when it changes what happens next. Too often, educators discover a learning problem after instruction is over: on an exit ticket, a quiz, a unit assessment, or a benchmark. By then, the misconception may have been reinforced for days or weeks.
Inclusive classrooms respond sooner. Think of formative assessment as a continuous instructional cycle:
Teach → Check → Respond → Check Again → Adjust
A check for understanding doesn’t have to be formal. Teachers can listen to partner conversations, ask students to explain their reasoning, examine a quick written response, use a hinge question, review student work in progress, or ask students to self-assess against success criteria. What matters is how teachers use that evidence to inform what happens next.
If several students demonstrate the same misconception, the next move might be whole-group reteaching with a different strategy. If a smaller group needs additional support, flexible grouping may make sense. If students understand the content but struggle to demonstrate it, the issue may be access rather than mastery.
The evidence helps us distinguish among those possibilities.
Data tells us what happened. Evidence helps us decide what to do next.
When educators regularly check and respond during learning, support becomes more timely and precise. Instead of waiting for students to fall far enough behind to trigger intervention, teachers can make smaller instructional adjustments while learning is still taking place.
Solve Instructional Problems Together
No teacher should have to figure all of this out alone. Learner variability makes collaborative expertise essential. Structured collaborative teams can bring multiple perspectives to the same evidence, identify patterns an individual teacher may not see, and build a larger repertoire of instructional responses.
But the questions teams ask matter.
Instead of beginning with:
Which students don't get it?
or
Who needs intervention?
begin with the evidence:
- What do we notice in the evidence?
- What patterns are emerging?
- What barriers might be contributing?
- What instructional response should we try next?
Those questions change the nature of a collaborative meeting. The goal is not to sort students according to performance. It is to understand what the evidence is telling us about teaching and learning and then select a response that matches the need.
ACS’s Achievement Teams framework gives educators a structured process for examining evidence, setting goals, and selecting instructional strategies that match student needs. Within an MTSS, that same process can help teams strengthen Universal instruction and determine when additional support is needed. Collaboration also makes it easier to treat instructional changes as hypotheses rather than permanent decisions:
- Here’s what we noticed.
- Here’s what we think may be contributing.
- Here’s the strategy we’re going to try.
- Here’s the evidence we’ll collect to see whether it worked.
Then the team learns together.
Stronger Tier 1 Instruction Creates More Opportunities to Succeed
Inclusive instruction isn’t about creating a different lesson for every student, lowering expectations, or eliminating the need for intervention. It is about intentionally creating the conditions that allow more students to access, engage with, and demonstrate grade-level learning and responding when the evidence tells us those conditions aren’t working yet.
That begins with seeing every student as a learner first.
When students struggle, we can look for strengths instead of deficits. We can become curious about barriers rather than making assumptions about ability. And we can use evidence to decide what instructional change to make next. Sometimes students will still need supplemental or intensified support. That’s exactly why those levels of support exist. But strong Universal instruction gives every student a better starting point.
Before you add intervention, start with the instruction students experience every day. Clarify the learning. Look for barriers. Scaffold without lowering expectations. Respond to evidence. And solve instructional problems together.
One instructional move may be all it takes to give a student a new way into the learning.
References
Tucker, C. (2025, November 3). Making Tier 1 whole group instruction more effective: Chunking, cooperative learning, and DOK questions. Dr. Catlin Tucker.