Inclusion in Practice: A Closer Look at Tier 2 and How Reading Eggs Supports MTSS in Canadian Classrooms

Which students are actually responding to the support layered onto their day, and which aren’t?

That is the question facing district leaders and school principals across Canada, who have a bird’s-eye view of dashboards, aggregate scores, trend lines and data points on a daily basis, but can struggle to get to the individual student level.

Failing to answer this question carries a significant systemic cost, resulting in students missing needed support, resources staying tied up, and interventions continuing without clear evidence they’re working.

To make matters even more complex, that blind spot isn't confined to one classroom – it spans hundreds of intervention groups running across a district at once, which makes tracking who's actually moving forward nearly impossible.

This is what a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), or its precursor, Response to Intervention (RTI), is meant to solve: giving a student more support without removing them from an inclusive classroom. The framework structure comprises three tiers, with Tier 2 as the one where groups form, where support gets decided, and where a school finds out whether a student's ready to step back to Tier 1 or needs to move up to Tier 3.

Jennifer Moore, principal of Maynard Public School in Prescott, Ontario, found that kind of clarity after switching to Reading Eggs, an evidence-based online 3-in-1 reading suite for PreK–6.

"Even our most reluctant students, when it comes to reading, are engaged by the program," she says. "[...] Teachers love that when the kids first start, they're assessed and then placed on a level that fits them."

This article looks at how Reading Eggs supports that kind of decision-making at every tier, with a particular focus on Tier 2. If your district is in Ontario, it's worth a closer look on its own: the Reading Eggs Digital Library holds approved vendor status through OECM, giving boards a more direct path to implement it. 

The three tiers of MTSS and how Reading Eggs supports each one

TIER 1: Universal instruction

Tier 1 is universal, supporting all learners, in a way that every student receives the same high-quality, explicit core instruction, and for roughly 80–90% of a class, that's enough on its own. This is prevention, not remediation; this is catching gaps before they form through universal screening rather than closing them after the fact.

Reading Eggs, Reading Eggspress and Fast Phonics make up the Reading Eggs suite and can work as supplemental programs at this tier.

Their structured lessons, organized across maps, adhere to a systematic synthetic phonics sequence followed by elements of structured literacy. This approach is aligned with the Science of Reading, moving every student through the same five pillars: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension, using pedagogical best practices and structured, explicit instruction.

All three programs in the suite start with a placement test, which places each student at their own level rather than a fixed grade-level entry point. This keeps instruction personalized even in a whole-class setting, and real-time progress monitoring gives teachers a running view of how every student in the class is progressing, not just whether the lessons are being completed.

The 4,000+ eBook library gives every student, not just those needing extra support, reading material matched to their level. And because students can access Reading Eggs at home as well as at school, they have more equitable access to books regardless of the resources available at home.

Lessons, activities, printable worksheets for offline learning – all are mapped to provincial and territorial curricula across Canada.

Tier 2: Targeted support in a real Canadian classroom

Tier 2 is where schools learn whether their interventions are working.

It’s small-group, targeted support for students who need extra help, delivered a few times a week and layered on top of core instruction. Schools use additional assessment and progress monitoring data at this tier to see how students are responding to targeted support. A student’s response helps determine whether they need more intensive support or are ready to step back, which is why this tier is where the most important decisions get made.

To see what that looks like in an actual classroom, rather than just a definition, take Jennifer Doherty's Grade 1/2 split class at Alder Flats Elementary, a rural school in Alberta. Some of her students needed something more focused just to keep pace, while others read well ahead of grade level. Jennifer describes using Reading Eggs "almost as an intervention at times," working directly with "the two or three who need extra support" while the rest of the class works through their own lessons. It's an ordinary classroom doing Tier 2 work without ever calling it that.

"Reading Eggs is very individualized," she says. "I can place my kids high or low, whatever reading level they're at."

That's the part that makes targeted support possible in practice: a student works from where their skills actually are, not from where the calendar says they should be. But knowing a gap exists isn't the same as knowing what it is. That's where the specific features of Reading Eggs come in:

• Pinpoints gaps. From individual student lesson performance to whole-school end-of-map quiz results, the Reading Eggs suite features a range of reporting types that highlight specific student struggles and inform next steps.

  • For Tier 2 support, the Skills Mastered report is particularly useful. It shows which students passed each skill on their first, second or third attempt – and which students haven’t yet passed. That makes it easy to see exactly where a student is struggling, whether that’s the letter X or compound words. A small-group session has a real target instead of a vague sense that a student needs help with reading.

• Re-teaches it directly. Skills are covered in sequence, phonemic awareness, letter-sound relationships, phonics and decoding, blending and segmenting, sight-word recognition, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension, with more repetition than a single classroom pass usually allows. A student who hasn't locked in one foundational piece typically struggles with whatever comes after it.

• Matches reading material to the student, not their age. The eBook library includes decodable texts built for both emerging readers and older students still working on foundational gaps, so a Grade 4 student who needs Grade 1-level phonics practice isn't stuck reading Grade 1-level content to get it.

• Corrects mistakes immediately. Feedback happens in the moment, not a week later in a report. A student who repeats a mistake three or four times before anyone catches it has practiced the wrong thing three or four times. It’s a simple reminder that practice doesn’t make perfect – but perfect practice does.

• Builds in small wins. Short activities and achievable goals matter here too, particularly for a student who's already decided they're not a reader.

• Works alongside the teacher, not instead of them. A teacher might explicitly teach a phonics pattern to the whole group, then send a few students to Reading Eggs for guided practice on that same pattern while they work with someone else.

Doherty's students never leave the classroom to get any of this. That's Tier 2 in practice: using data to drive decisions. The data tells you whether a student is responding: ready to step back to Tier 1, or in need of Tier 3.

Tier 3: Intensive support

Tier 3 is the most intensive layer: individualized, often daily, and usually through close collaboration with a reading specialist or learning support teacher rather than in place of one. Only a small number of students, generally under 5%, need this level of support.

While Reading Eggs doesn't replace that specialist relationship, it helps extend it through:

• Real-time, data-driven reports help diagnose skills gaps, whether that's a particular vowel pattern, a blending difficulty, or phonological awareness more broadly, giving a specialist a starting point instead of a blank page.

• Focused lessons can then target exactly those foundational gaps, while frequent progress reports let a specialist or teacher track whether a student is responding rather than waiting for the next report card cycle.

• Printable resources extend that same targeted practice into the time between direct sessions.

But why do it? The evidence behind a tiered support system

We know how MTSS works, tier by tier. But do we know why it matters? The answer is yes, and it’s a “yes” backed by evidence.

Researchers at UBC, Lipka and Siegel, have studied early identification and intervention in reading for years, and what they found points the same way: catching difficulties early changes the outcome. It’s also, in a smaller way, an inclusion story – a student gets the support they need while staying in the classroom, where they belong.   Ontario's Right to Read inquiry, from 2022, makes a similar point more bluntly, stating that boards aren't catching it early enough, the report says, plainly.

Reading Eggs fits within this framework, rather than being the whole answer. It's built around the same five pillars we mentioned earlier, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, so nothing here is new ground, just the same structure reinforced at every tier. What’s more, short, regular, focused learning sessions, according to the study behind the program, were enough to raise achievement and move the needle on reading skills and benchmark scores.

Ontario boards get one more thing: the Reading Eggs Digital Library is on OECM's approved vendor list – meaning that administrators have a simple, streamlined pathway to bring it into their schools.