Instructional Strategies and Interventions
Domain 4: Instructional Strategies and Interventions
This domain tests evidence-based, explicit instruction and how to adapt it by disability, skill area, and data-not a catalog of activities.
Core rules and concepts
- Explicit instruction: model, guided practice, independent practice, with clear objectives, examples and nonexamples, frequent responses, and immediate corrective feedback.
- Universal Design for Learning builds multiple means of engagement, representation, and action/expression into planning; it does not lower standards.
- Reading: phonemic awareness and phonics need systematic, cumulative sequences; fluency builds with repeated reading; comprehension needs text structure, vocabulary, and strategy instruction.
- Math: concrete–representational–abstract sequence, schema instruction, worked examples, and fact fluency practice.
- Scaffolds are temporary: prompts, graphic organizers, sentence frames, chunked tasks. Fade them as independence grows.
- Data-based decision making: set a goal, graph progress, and adjust when 4–6 data points fall below the aimline.
- High-leverage practices include explicit instruction, scaffolded supports, flexible grouping, and feedback.
Worked example
A student confuses fractions with unlike denominators. The teacher starts with fraction tiles, models finding common denominators, uses a representational drawing, then moves to the abstract algorithm. She gives worked examples, then guided problems with error correction, and checks independent items. After six probes with accuracy below 70%, she reteaches equivalent fractions rather than simply assigning more worksheets.
Traps
- Using one method for every disability.
- Calling a worksheet “scaffolding.”
- Fading supports too early or never.
- Ignoring progress data before changing intervention.