Small-group reading and math for schools.

Every session follows the same plan every day, and the plan fits the age.

Kindergarten and first grade (30 minutes)

1. A short welcome, with every child in their own marked seat.
2. About 20 minutes of a published Direct Instruction lesson, with a one-minute movement break halfway through. The group answers together on a signal, and every child also gets individual turns, so we hear each child every minute or two. Mistakes are corrected on the spot. Some lessons take two sessions, and that’s planned for.
3. About 5 minutes of very short timings, from 15 seconds to a minute, and card practice with us on letters, sounds or numbers. We run each timing and keep each child’s chart, and every child sees their own chart every day.
4. A wrap-up with praise for what each child did well.

Children earn tokens all through the session. Your staff walks the children to and from the room.

Grades 2–5 (45 minutes)

1. About 28 minutes of a published Direct Instruction lesson. The group answers together on a signal, and every child also gets individual turns, so we hear each child every few minutes. Mistakes are corrected on the spot and checked again before the lesson moves on.
2. About 10 minutes of one-minute timings. Every child works on their own sheet at their own step. From third grade, students mark their own chart and we check it. In second grade, we mark it for them.
3. About 4 minutes of flash-card practice (SAFMEDS), each child with their own deck. From third grade, students practice with a partner.
4. A few minutes to check the charts and wrap up. Each student keeps a point card for the session.

Grades 6–8 (45 minutes, or your class period)

1. A Direct Instruction lesson from a program written for older students. In reading, every session covers decoding longer words, fluency building and a comprehension routine.
2. One-minute timings. Students keep their own charts and set their own aim for the week.
3. Flash-card practice (SAFMEDS) with a partner.
4. A wrap-up. Feedback is private: we never read a score aloud or compare one student with another. Students earn points toward a privilege your school approves.

For reading, we teach from Reading Mastery and, for older students, Corrective Reading. For math, we teach from Connecting Math Concepts and, for older students, Corrective Mathematics and Essentials for Algebra.

Most students who are behind in reading or math do well in a small group. Some students are better served one-on-one or by your school’s own specialists, and we’ll tell you that up front. During placement, we ask each student’s teacher one question: how does this student do in a small group?

These students usually start with your school’s own services, and we can talk about a group later:

• a student who works with a one-on-one aide
• a student with a behavior plan for aggression, self-injury or leaving the room
• a student whose IEP says a service must come from your special educator

Our groups add to your school’s services. They never replace the services in a student’s IEP.

Every month, you get a short report for each group:

• sessions held and minutes taught
• lessons completed against the term plan, and each student’s mastery-test results
• each student’s growth on the skills we chart
• oral reading compared with published reading benchmarks, and normed screener results from the start, middle and end of the term
• our fidelity log: which lessons we taught, and the checks we ran on our own teaching

You can also see any child’s chart whenever you ask. The report never ranks students against each other. We share student information only under your data-sharing agreement.

Sessions happen on your campus during the school day, in a room your school chooses, with school staff in the building. Before the first session, we provide:

• background checks, including Missouri’s Family Care Safety Registry, plus any check your district requires
• a certificate of insurance for general liability with abuse and molestation coverage, with your school named as an additional insured
• a signed data-sharing agreement on your district’s terms, under FERPA, and the Kansas Student Data Privacy Act for Kansas schools
• a W-9 and whatever vendor registration your district uses

In our records, students go by first name and last initial. Student records stay on our own devices, and we return or destroy them when the agreement ends.

• In a study of second graders who were behind in reading, one-on-one teaching was not significantly better than groups of three on any outcome. One-on-one did beat groups of ten (Vaughn et al., 2003).
• The federal reading practice guide gives its strongest evidence rating to intensive small-group instruction for students who score below benchmark, and suggests groups of three or four, three to five times a week (Gersten et al., 2008).
• Group size should follow age. In a large review of 96 tutoring experiments, pairs did nearly as well as one-on-one in preschool through first grade, and groups of three or more did less well. In grades 2–5, groups of three or more had some of the strongest averages in the review (Nickow et al., 2020). That’s why our K–1 groups are two children, three at most.
• Session length should follow age too. The federal reading guide suggests 20 to 30 minutes in kindergarten and 40 to 50 minutes in second grade (Gersten et al., 2008). Our K–1 sessions are 30 minutes, and sessions from second grade up are 45.
• For older readers, the federal reading guide for grades 4–9 gives its strongest rating to decoding long words, fluency-building practice and comprehension routines (Vaughn et al., 2022). Our reading sessions for grades 6–8 cover all three every time, with programs written for older students.
• In a randomized study of second through fourth graders, four sessions a week led to clearer math gains than one or two sessions a week, with the same total minutes (Codding et al., 2016). That’s why our groups meet four days a week.
• Direct Instruction programs were written for groups, with placement tests, group answers on a signal, individual turns and a mastery test every five to ten lessons (Silbert, 2005).

One honest note: for the children who are furthest behind, one-on-one teaching tends to do better. A large review found larger effects for one-on-one than for small groups, though both were positive (Neitzel et al., 2022), and a randomized study of first graders found the same (Schwartz et al., 2012). That’s why our groups stay small, our youngest students meet in groups of two or three, the students who are furthest behind go in the smallest groups, and we recommend one-on-one tutoring when a child stalls.

Every study, with links to the sources →