When a kid is struggling to gain and keep and independently utilize foundational academic skills in reading, writing, and math, remediation is needed. What does this mean? It means you need to take a baseline, identify the specific gaps, create an individual learning plan addressing those exact gaps using an evidence based toolkit, and consistently take the student through it, assessing along the way to inform instruction. It’s nitty-gritty work that’s vital to a student being set up for success. However, if we only focus on the remediation side, we often see something else start to happen. The student starts falling behind in their vocabulary, background knowledge, communication skills, and critical thinking. Why? Well, because they are spending most of their cognitive energy, and sometimes instructional time, focused on filling in missing gaps, that they don’t have the space to focus on new content learning at their cognitive level.

The apparent necessity of this dual approach gave rise to a train-track model that we follow at Redwood Literacy when building individualized learning plans for every Redwood student. In order to foster thriving, confident students, we must give them both sides of the track. 

Track one is the nitty gritty intervention. As mentioned above, it begins with getting a clear baseline on a student’s foundational reading, writing, and math skills – whatever instructors identify as an area of struggle – then building an individualized intervention plan embedded with progress monitoring and benchmarking. It’s essential not only that students are getting intervention, but that they’re getting the right intervention – an explicit instructional approach that follows a clear scope and sequence of skills. This intervention needs to be delivered by a qualified instructor – ideally, one who has ongoing coaching support and a community of thought partners. And a sense of humor. The relationship aspect is crucial; it’s the foundation of instruction. An instructor should be an empathetic, creative, optimistic, outside-the-box thinker who builds relationship by showing up vulnerably and authentically. It’s the instructor’s job to model how to make mistakes and to create a safe place to grow. 

This is the first side of the track – the remediation side. On this side of the track, relationship building, instructional expertise, and quality curriculum carry a student toward mastery of fundamental skills. 

But trains don’t get too far on one track…

Track two is accommodation. Building independent foundational skills takes a lot of exposure and time, especially for neurodivergent students. In the meantime, students need a way to access instructional content at their cognitive comprehension level (struggling to decode text doesn’t mean you don’t understand the ideas expressed in that text) or else they’ll fall behind. This is a big problem, and it often happens when students get intervention – if they don’t have the accommodation side of the train track (assistive technology) to help them access grade-level content, they’re not getting the comprehensive support they need. “The Matthew Effect” describes the phenomenon in which students who do well in their literacy education early on continue to do well later, while those who struggle early on continue to do worse. When students’ attention is spent entirely on foundational literacy skills, they’re not being exposed to new vocabulary words or background knowledge; they’re not absorbing what their peers absorb. This train-track model is a powerful way to counter the dispiriting consequences of the Matthew Effect. 

One of my former students, Andrew, serves as a perfect case study for my train-track model. I started working with Andrew when he was in third grade, and I worked with him for his first five years. He’s in eleventh grade now, and still working with a Redwood instructor. Andrew’s dyslexia is severe, so he spent the first several years on the remediation side of the train track, going through the entire Wilson Reading System® program with a certified instructor, logging hundreds and hundreds of hours building foundational skills. Once that foundation was in place, we began focusing on the second side of the train track. (We know now that we ought to have had both tracks in place from the beginning – know better, do better.) 

In sixth grade, as Andrew transitioned into middle school, he started diving into assistive technology, coming to understand how those tools could help ease his cognitive load. Even though he’d gone through the entire Wilson program – a significant feat – he still struggled with some spelling, and his reading pace remained slow. But once both of those tracks were in place, his progress took off: it was a Japanese bullet train cruising down those tracks. On his SATs, he scored in the 90th percentile for reading and writing. For reading comprehension, he scored in the 75th percentile and, according to the comprehension index of the Feifer Assessment of Reading, he was in the 61st percentile for written expression. (In tandem with Wilson Reading System, Andrew completed Redwood’s own written expression and comprehension curriculum, Writing Our World™.) 

Andrew achieved these astonishing scores (remember I told you his dyslexia was severe?) because he spent those crucial learning years focused on this comprehensive train-track approach. 

Nice try, Matthew.

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