The goal of Recognition & Response is to create high quality early childhood classrooms in which teachers administer periodic, universal screening for all children and research-based interventions and progress monitoring for individual children who show signs of learning difficulties.

Recognition & Response involves first aligning assessment and instructional practices to state early learning standards and then ensuring that classroom assessment is tied to effective or promising instructional practices. Frequent screening and progress monitoring provide the teacher with the means to identify children who would benefit from additional instructional supports. It also allows teachers to track both the level and rate of academic growth in her students. A hierarchy of increasingly intense interventions is used as part of the Recognition & Response system.

The first level of this hierarchy (tier 1) provides teachers with the means of determining whether instruction for the whole class may need to be modified and helps them identify children who require additional supports.

The second level (tier 2) provides teachers with specific instructional practices that have been shown to be effective in addressing a particular learning problem using strategies that require minimal adjustments to classroom routines (e.g., working with small groups).

The third level (tier 3) provides teachers with more intensive, individualized approaches. A collaborative problem-solving process that includes parents and specialists assists teachers in selecting appropriate interventions linked to assessment data at each level of the intervention hierarchy.

At this time, specific guidelines for implementing Recognition & Response do not exist, although efforts are underway to create manuals that specify each of the components and to create the tools and resources needed to implement each component as part of an integrated system. This section describes what is known about Recognition & Response and how it might look in practice. Although the examples focus on supporting early literacy, Recognition & Response is designed to address all aspects of early learning and development in young children.

Next: Essential components of Recognition & Response: The conceptual framework