The Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI) is a dual-level professional development intervention designed for both at-risk K-1 students and their classroom teachers. We are part of the National Research Center on Rural Education Support, which is funded through the Institute for Educational Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education. This center is based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The TRI helps teachers:

• acquire essential knowledge of early reading development and efficient instructional strategies;
• develop skills in matching instruction to informal assessment; and
• apply their learning particularly for the benefit of struggling readers.

TRI teachers work with their struggling readers intensively on a daily basis for about 15 minutes, initially one-on-one and transitioning to very small groups, using efficient, evidence-based reading strategies refined daily with a diagnostic mindset. The effectiveness and efficiency of the TRI lie both in the reading strategies themselves that integrate multiple essential early reading abilities always in the context of real words and books, and in the diagnostic thinking that teachers are guided to adopt with each day’s plan.