Hi Chris,

This is a great question to pose to the cohort. I will offer some suggestions, but encourage other cohort members to jump in with ideas as well! At PRESS, we typically suggest that schools look at ORF/CBM data at 2nd grade for the reason that you have outlined above: aReading is a helpful tool, but it can end up giving teachers a very wide list of student needs, and this can leave teachers confused about where to go next (especially in the classwide setting). You are correct that we are not FAST experts at PRESS, but from what I have gathered, it sounds like aReading may have some more diagnostic assessments built in?

The purpose of a classwide intervention is to address the needs of a majority of the class with a "booster" in the core instruction. In second grade, this is typically fluency, but every once in a while a majority of the class is low in decoding (as measured by accuracy on the ORF) and would benefit from a phonics classwide intervention. Fluency is pretty straightforward, but phonics gets to be trickier, because the question becomes: which phonics intervention would benefit a majority of the students? They are likely in various places with this need, so it is challenging to find one specific phonics intervention that will benefit at least 50% of the class. You have a few different options based off of what you outlined above:

-Determine, based off of the information you have, which phonics skill would benefit the most students. If you have a large list of needs within phonics, consider what would benefit most of the students - what is one of the higher skills that many students still need? If students are further behind, they may still benefit from the explicit instruction around a more advanced phonics skill. The challenge with classwide is to make sure you aren't diving in and doing tier 2 analysis just yet, as that defeats the purpose of the efficient aspect of classwide interventions.

-Deliver F-1 (fluency 1): supported cloze, as this intervention is a nice bridge between phonics and fluency, and also encourages the use of instructional level text so that all students should be able to access the text being used.

We typically do not suggest a classwide phonemic awareness intervention above 1st grade because there is rarely a situation where a classroom teacher even has phonemic awareness data on all students, much less knows that at least 50% of the class has a need in PA. Also, there is a diminishing return on phonemic awareness instruction as students get older, so in the situation outlined above, the other 68% of the class that does not need PA would not really benefit from a PA classwide intervention.

What about the rest of the cohort? Does anyone else use aReading to determine classwide needs, and what does that look like at your sites?