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Small-Group Interventions That Actually Work with Kerry Cusick & Erin Sharon

Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ® | Science of Reading for Teachers

Chapters
0:00
You Can’t Fix Tier One With Interventions
1:45
Meet Carrie And Erin
3:15
The Balanced Literacy To Science Of Reading Shift
5:30
Why Alignment Matters For Double Dosing
8:10
What Tier One Looks Like Now
10:20
From Accuracy To Automaticity
12:40
Inside An Intervention Lesson Routine
16:20
Upper Grades: Morphology And Knowledge
19:00
Who Gets Support And How We Decide
22:10
Multi‑Component Intervention In K–2
24:20
Phonemic Awareness With Letters Done Right
27:20
Making Aligned Practice Engaging
30:20
Fluency From Sounds To Text
33:30
Backward Planning And Rapid Charts
36:20
Building Meaning, Vocabulary, Morphology
39:10
Sentence‑Level Comprehension Strategies
41:20
Where To Start: Culture And Systems
43:30
Shared Responsibility And Ongoing Learning
52:50
Stay Connected And Closing
Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ® | Science of Reading for Teachers
Small-Group Interventions That Actually Work with Kerry Cusick & Erin Sharon
Mar 27, 2026

Episode 248

There’s a saying we hear often in literacy work: you don’t want to try to intervene your way out of a Tier 1 problem. Real change happens when classroom instruction and small-group support are aligned.

In this episode, we’re joined by Kerry Cusick and Erin Sharon, two reading interventionists, who share how aligning Tier 1 instruction with the small-group work they lead every day transformed both their approach and student outcomes. While their work lives in intervention, the routines and decision-making they describe are just as relevant for classroom teachers running small groups.

In this conversation, we explore:

  • What small-group intervention looked like before alignment and what had to change
  • How clearer, more consistent Tier 1 instruction reshaped small-group teaching
  • What responsive small-group lessons look like when they’re built around student need
  • How phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and meaning work together in small groups
  • Why fluency matters and how routines move students from sounds to connected text

Kerry and Erin share practical examples from their MTSS work, including how they use data to form groups, align with classroom scope and sequence, and design small-group instruction that builds accuracy, automaticity, and meaning.

RESOURCES

 
We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night.

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