Reflection

on Assessment in Teaching

I have been teaching for two years now and both years I was given sets of data for my students. The first year was a wash with the data, as I had little understanding of how to apply what I needed. I finally did my own investigating and discovered I could look at a lot of helpful information about my students through their benchmarks. This class has taken that even further, as I have a better idea how to apply the information to my students as individuals.

This class made me aware that I don’t have to rely solely on standardized tests. I am so used to everyone screaming “research-based” at me, and for good reason, but I actually came across sections of the text which said that you, as the teacher, sometimes can follow your instincts.

I always write an annual plan for the year, but next years’ will include some planned assessments that are not given by the school to everyone, but by me to my Intensive Reading students. I feel better prepared to investigate assessments and to write actions plans for my students. I wish I had the time in a year to writing a LIP for each of my students, but I know that I cannot. I can, however, try to get my students self-directed and writing their own reading goals for the year, and I can choose the ten lowest students to write LIP’s for, and I will.

I know that my experience is very different working in a charter school, but I also have the unique opportunity of working in a K-8 environment and I will soon be the most qualified reading teacher on staff. I know that I’m doing good work in my Title-1 school and I know that my new skills in assessment will make me a much better teacher. I hope I can be the reading specialist for the school I work at now, because we are in dire need of one.

Next Years Assessment Goals

• Involve students in writing their own reading goals for the year
• Choose an in-class benchmark assessment
• Involve students in self-selected portfolios
• Write LIP’s for Tier 3 RTI students
• Portfolio checks and discussions three times in the year
• 10% improvement minimum for every student in my class from last year’s benchmark scores

I want to make sure I can truly be qualified to teach any grade level reading, but my focus will always be struggling adolescents. Nothing feels better than encouraging a kid who hasn’t felt positive about reading or academics EVER. My students told me reading wasn’t boring anymore, and it was the most touching moment of my teaching career to date. I cannot wait to move forward a better, more hopeful, teacher!

Gimme an R...Gimme a T....Gimme an I: Gearing up for RTI

RESPONSE TO INTERVENTION, YEAH!

RTI came about through the  Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA; U.S.

Department of Education, 2004). It meant that schools had to deal with literacy problems and began using the Response to Intervention model.

Three Tiers

Tier 1- Classroom level support

Tier 2- Small group instruction (for a short time period)

Tier 3- Typically 1 on 1 support for the students who struggle the most

RTI is not well researched in the upper grades and does not lend itself to being used there because of the structure of upper level courses. Students also may not benefit from being pulled out of class for TIer 2 and 3 RTI because it is the opposite of making them feel capable and high achieving.

Yet, if a teacher has a strategy that works but is not scientifically well researched, it does not need to be dismissed, just like RTI does not need to be completely removed from upper level grades because it is not well researched in that context. Let’s not limit our teachers.

Supplemental Interventions

RTI is dependent on a teacher’s ability to spot students who are having reading difficulty and then assess them accurately to group them correctly and monitor progress.

My school uses benchmark tests given three to four times a year to find students who fall below the expected standard. Just below the standard for the grade level qualifies a student for a Tier 2 RTI intervention.

Then, when in RTI, the quality of intervention instruction varies wildly. It may be teacher designed, or it may be one of the growing number of commercially available intervention curriculum materials.

INTERVENTIONS SHOULD BE-

• focused on particular reading skills
• communicative with parents
• interactive
• full of dialogue
• with built in checks for progress

Intervention must be INTERVENTION. It should not be typical instruction in the core classroom, but instead specifically designed to meet the needs of students. If you’re doing it right it will be time consuming and intensive.

2 to 3 times a week, 30 minute lessons, at least 20 weeks

FIsher and Frey discuss here how students to teacher ratio should be no more than 5:1, yet in our RTI, we have 20 students will 2 teachers, 20 minutes a day. It was difficult because they are older, behaviorally challenging and we were understaffed. #charterschoolprobz

#title1probz (Just kidding on the hashtags, but really, though)

Parapros should not be doing RTI. RTI should not cause students to miss other instruction (ideally) A reading specialist should be in charge of RTI.

Like the advice of Data Wise, developing a plan for the RTI program with all the facets noted above included will help make successful reading intervention a reality.

High Risk Learners

Create RTI that involves the classroom learning and authentic tasks. HIgh risk learners need specific, thorough and novel learning experiences in RTI that align with the skills they are specifically struggling with. Tier 3 interventions MUST be done by reading and language specialists, and take extensive time and consistent assessment.

5 important features

1. Teacher is critical to success, must be involved
2. comprehensive approach to reading and writing
3. very engaging for the student
4. driven by assessment (DUH!)
5. opportunities for reading AND writing

Students deserve intervention at this level. It is often wasted because the tasks during the regular school day are too difficult and not differentiated for the struggling reader. They may learn during intervention, but they are missing the rest of the day. Parapros are no substitute for reading specialist. RTI should be a time of the day they look forward to, with instruction that assists their current learning goals and targets specific reading strategies. TIer 3 must be totally driven by consistent skill assessment, especially because we love to see them move up to TIer 2 and out of the need for intervention! Progress, progress, progress!

Plan your lessons for RTI, with a purpose! (See Data Wise post for planning ideas)

Tier 3 should be 1:1

Assessment in RTI

So your benchmarks show a student below grade level in reading...now what?

Gather assessment data on the student-“Look through multiple lenses”

Get his/her team together- parents, reading specialists, content area teachers…

Remember, assessment drives RTI.

Use formal, criterion referenced, informal (checklists, anecdotal), rubrics, curriculum assessments, observations and self assessments.

Once data is collected, decision making time! Plan an intervention with checks for progress. Decide what needs to happen and give it a try! Be flexible and positive. Students in RTI need more assessment, but it doesn’t all have to be mind numbing formal assessments, as noted above.

yeah, my tabs are open, but here is an assessment matrix from the book. Nice way to remember to interview and think about outside factors affecting the young learner.

KAPOW: Progress Monitoring

Sometimes students are overrun with resources they don’t know how to use. Not the most important aspect of this chapter, but a valuable piece of information to remember…

Feedback can boost achievement. Students love to see their own progress. Even as a graduate student, I live on the canvas “grades” page and reread my teacher’s comments many times.

Students need to understand what the goal they are trying to achieve is. How is one expected to work hard when they don’t know what the point of it is? ESTABLISH A PURPOSE

Respond to your student’s work.

Not summative, formative.  Don’t note errors alone, provide suggestions and mention positive points

Modify instruction. Be flexible with your lessons and rework what isn’t working for a particular student, especially in RTI where you have a small group. Without feedback, students cannot grow as learners. It helps them self evaluate and self correct.

Check daily for understanding. Create your own assessments. No lesson should start before the assessment and end goal are defined. Have everything ready, especially the progress checks.

Use student work to make instructional decisions and never be scared to do a lesson over if it wasn’t working. My mom, a veteran teachers, always says “drop back five and punt” which I think of constantly when frustrating teaching. Go back, try again differently. :) Maybe she isn’t an ancient master, but it’s great advice.

Leading the RTI REVOLUTION

Much like the advice in datawise, the plan for RTI must be shared by a team/school staff. Everyone should be working together for the success of the students. Yet, all teams need a captain.

So, you’re captain…

discuss and expect quality

develop quality indicators and discuss

Use a protocol to analyze student work together (with you at the helm). With common language and definitions of educator vocabulary, conversations are purposeful and not looping.

Report RTI progress to families. They should be involved. It can be motivating and it’s important that parents understand what it means for their child to be in RTI and what they can do to help them.

Are you ready to lead the literacy revolution? YASSSSSSS.

Connecting Assessment and Instruction

Specific Advice To More Effectively Use Assessment Data At School

1- Create a data task force at school, a specific team of people who are primarily responsible for organizing the aspects of managing data use at school

2-No one person can be alone in the responsibility of managing assessment data. That does not send the right message that assessment information is important for every teacher and that it is a team effort

3-With all the testing available, it’s important to identify what YOU need to know about your students. Find out what data is available on your students!

4-Create an inventory of your student assessment data, with a clear purpose in mind

5- Dialogue! My school is small, so the whole middle school ELA team could discuss what we know about our students and look at our assessment information together

6- Turn the dialogue into a consistently scheduled meeting in which we analyze the data on our students and the progress through the year

*A NOTE ON COLLABORATIVE PRODUCTIVITY

Establish norms of behavior and communication for meeting from the start

Create structured ways of completing the work, using protocols that provide strategies for completing the group tasks

Make a plan, or “improvement process” with small, manageable goals to complete

Create a lesson plan for your meetings

Looking At Data

Simplified, visual displays of data are necessary to aid in the understanding of data. The better assessment data can be understood, the more it can be used to inform instruction.

Choose a specific educational question to guide your display. The more simple it can be, the better (usually). Tables with rows of numbers can be difficult to assign to memory. There is too much information. So ask yourself a edu question- “How are our 8th grade students performing in reading skills relative to the overall scores of Hillsborough 8th graders?” “Are free/reduced lunch students in our school performing lower than higher income bracket students in the same grade?” “How did 7th grade do in ELA test last year compared to their 6th grade year?” (I love comparisons, and they really do help in understanding the significance of the rows and rows of numbers)

Now create a data display for these comparisons. It can be a simple bar graph or a pie chart. The standard practice puts proficiency categories on the horizontal axis and outcomes on the vertical access, with higher bars then reflecting higher proficiency. Simple enough.

Displaying trends can be done with simplified columns of data, each indicative of a school year or grade level. In the past I have gone through the years and looked at the lowest ten percent of students through the years to see who has remained in the lowest achievement category for repeated years. I realize I could have charted this and kept up with the chart for a simpler way of figuring out what I wanted to know, instead of sloppy names of students on post-its all over my desk.

***A NOTE ON GRAPHICS/DISPLAYS FOR YOUR DATA

Title your charts and graphs!

Label your rows and columns

The significant information needs to be the most visually dominant (largest, boldest, centered)

Don’t get cluttered!

Clarify if the comparisons are of the progress of the same students, or other groups

Turn all this charting and focused looking at data into discussions to best benefit the teachers at your school and help affect their instruction

Hands on talk time with the data, such as passing out charts and asking teachers to think-pair-share will create two greats things, an opportunity for teachers to communicate about what they see in assessment graphics AND meetings that aren’t a total and complete BORE! Hooray!

Always encourage the asking of questions about your assessment data. Teachers can brainstorm and have questions ready during meetings, or they can get in small groups and come up with questions together.

I also thought while reading this that teachers could brainstorm questions they’d like to know about their students success, much like I did above, and be responsible for creating graphics themselves and sharing them in meetings. Yes, they are busy and this wouldn’t be the most fun, but with examples, it could be incredibly beneficial.

PRO-TIP- Have actual test questions from the assessment your discussing available in your meeting

Do you know what the problem is and how you’re going to attempt to solve it?

It’s important that specific problems your students face are not ignored or “misdiagnosed” as everyone scrambles to improve low performance with an action plan but not a clear issue they are trying to address, besides general low performance.

Start with a single source of data (though you should have a large inventory of data, remember?) and don’t leap to conclusions. Try not to let old biases get in your way.

What specific question do you have about problems with your students’ learning? Is there a specific content area within the test (one single source of data first!) that the students are struggling with? Many tests now have the scores divided by content area standards and it’s not hard to find the specific ones students are not successfully learning. For example, a chart could be made with each item on a test that a majority of students got wrong.

Essential questions to know whether you have identified a specific “learner-centered problem” to drive improvement

A Look at Instruction

There are so many factors that change the results of classroom instruction and so much blame seems to be put on teachers, that having productive conversations about specific learning issues can actually be difficult.

With one simple goal for change, we can look, with a protocol and specific hands on tasks, at what can change in instruction to better meet the learning needs of students.

Example in the book was to brainstorm the many reasons (several beyond our control) that students weren’t thinking abstractly and then categorize that information. A few, like students struggling with critical thinking, were labelled as instructional shortcomings and therefore they were able to make a game plan to help students think more abstractly about the math they were learning.

Looking thoroughly and critically at your own instruction is a difficult and necessary skill.

***Tips to Peer Observe Teachers***

Peer observe other teachers- make this practice feel supportive.

Get specific with what you’re looking for in observing or examining- Use precise vocabulary. Don’t generalize, literally write what you’ve observed about students and classroom

Create norms to discuss classroom observations

Record teachers to watch themselves

There needs to be explicit and defined vocabulary. For example, all teachers need to agree on what a student looks like when “engaged” or “confused” These vague notions are not otherwise helpful

Analyzing your own practices as a teacher can be difficult. Teachers need to be used to being in each other’s classrooms, being watched while teaching and discussing their own practice. It needs to be seen as an opportunity to improve, not just a stressful evaluation.

Sometimes you have little time, lots of data or little data but regularly scheduled meetings and a task force. All schools have to trade off a little of sacrificing their time to examine data that could be otherwise used (time, the most important resource of all) for planning or tutoring, etc. It’s important, again, to know what you want to accomplish. Essential questions need to guide your focused time to work with data.

Lights, Camera, ACTION PLANS

You’ve charted, brainstormed, discussed and now you have a few strategies to help solve an instructional problem in your school...As Tony the Tiger says...Grrrrrreat!

Now Create an Action Plan….

Tips for Action Plans

Decide on specific strategies for the classroom and commit to them.

Agree on what it will look like. Carefully describe, with examples, how it WILL play out in the classrooms.

WRITE IT DOWN. Put that plan on paper. It documents that everyone has responsibilities to put the plan into effect, it makes us accountable.

Plan checks to monitor the progress of your strategy.

A great aspect of the advice in this action plan was teachers brainstorming how feasible a strategy was relative to its impact in the classroom. The best strategies to work with have high feasibility and high impact. I love when we are realistic about the problems we face, in terms of community support, budget, time, student instructional level. Sometimes I think all teachers are either so jaded they no longer have any interest in changing their practices, or so naive they CAN’T realistically do things in the classroom because they live in a dream world. Let’s meet in the middle. Let’s be realistic, specific and get accustomed to changing and adapting instruction TOGETHER.

Also, strategies sometimes need to be implemented slowly, but sometimes too slow is the problem. Again, communicate specific goals and be realistic. Set timelines and progress checks.

Progress? How to Tell…..

You’ve got a team and a plan. How do you know you’re making it happen….

Decide ahead of time how you’re going to know. Choose assessments, even anecdotal or informal, to check on the progress of your action plan. You can examine classwork and homework, but create a checklist or survey about the work to gather specific information. Did the student answer the open ended question correctly or partially correct? Did they omit steps? A spreadsheet can be used.

Observe students, again with a specific survey or standardized conference questionnaire.

Asking students about their own learning! I love to do this! Have a conversation guide ready. In general, be prepared to standardize these informal measures of progress so that the data can be easily used to check the status of an action plan.

Using benchmarks monitors progress steadily, but multiple choice tests are not the best, however the trade-off is they are not time consuming like individually administered tests.

Develop your own assessment, it’s a flexible and specific way to monitor student progress, especially if you’ve developed a plan for a specific area of low achievement. A self made progress monitoring test could be the best indicator of your action plan’s success. However, there may be challenges in validity and reliability.

Setting Goals.

Be realistic and look at long term data. What level would indicate success? Define this long-term goal, similar to NCLB. A long term goal and intermediate goals in between would help make sure you are making progress with your student and meeting the National requirements for consistent and constant improvement under NCLB.

It is often very difficult to be realistic about what your students can achieve. We as educators want to challenge ourselves to truly increase the abilities of our students, but also do not want to turn these carefully created action plans into more frustrating, blaming and high pressure focal points that detract from rather than support teacher.They can become that if the goal is too steep and outrageous. Too easy of a goal and you haven’t really accomplished anything either.

Momentum for Change.

A dream school is one in which teachers are on the same page.  This can only be achieved through clear communication. Use one page summaries and simplified informational sheets instead of relying on the action plan document.

Integrate your action plan into your instruction. Do not allow it to take away from goals that are working well now. It would be a tragedy for your action plan to succeed while creating learning deficits in other areas.

Group teachers into teams with accountability towards different aspects of your plan. It will ensure everyone is more prepared for meetings because they are personally accountable and have a team for support and inspiration.

Being Honest

What works for some groups, even if it is the same plan, does not work for others It can be a difficult situation to take a hard look at whether the strategy you have put so much work into is truly effective. It may be well designed and executed, but if it isn’t working out. IT ISN’T WORKING OUT.

Keep It Fresh

When this hard work communicating and creating an action plan becomes embedded in

your routine, you need to challenge yourself to go deeper, set higher goals, involve more people. The first time the goal is to get staff to think about addressing student needs, driven by data. Years down the road, the process should be more and more effective

Struggling Readers Are Not Created Equal

American students start off strong. Young, eager learners compete with their global peers. By high school, they have fallen far behind the world in their scholastic ability. Theorists have said we are pushing a one-size-fits-all curriculum with difficult, jargon filled trade books, and we are. Sadly, it seems we have some of these very important answers for how to best help students, but have yet to put this knowledge into practice. I was astounded to learn that graduate teachers are forced to explain to eager teachers that in a good half a century, “relevant” research will find its way into their classrooms. Teachers have to struggle constantly between doing what they are told and doing what is right. I have to struggle with this everyday, but to be honest, it’s not much of a decision. I focus my attention on infusing a little joy into reading. We read a lot and we read authentic and interesting material. We cracked open a literature textbook three times in the whole year. It was a TON of work to do it on my own, design my own lessons and assessments.

I didn’t need to be told that one size fits all because I’ve been a classroom teachers to disenfranchised, academically struggling youth. My students run the gamut from dodgers to politicians, literalists and minimalists. The research together is reminding me over and over again that my students need individualized plans and attention, something that I feel is my responsibility, even while I don’t see how it is possible that I’m ever going to be able to give them everything they need to get back on track. They are so varied and diverse in their skills, so demotivated, so discouraged with reading. They’ve had difficult and therefore incredibly boring textbooks forced on them. They aren’t given options. They’re content area teachers are caring, but they teach by the book, a standardized curriculum purchased and pushed on them.

I don’t have fifty years. I have a few short months. My kids were the children in kindergarten targeted for intervention. Since they were budding learners they’ve been identified as high risk and thrown into reading intervention and now at the end of middle school, they are still behind.

Perhaps inventive writing and more authentic tasks since kindergarten would have helped. Maybe all the mistakes identified in research were made with my students. They were taught by para-pros, they were not properly assessed with an IRI, and had decoding and phonics pushed on them when that wasn’t the skill set they specifically needed. Perhaps unfounded research was pushed on them, a reading intervention that didn’t work, pushed on them by political greed and corruption. So sad.

Sometimes I feel like their last hope. We don’t do test prep. We don’t round robin read. We don’t do much reading aloud except in small groups, because their skills are so low they are embarrassed by their own reading voices. Tutoring and individualized attention would help, but I can’t manage it. I spend one minute with a student and the rest of the class, my avoiders and dodgers, start avoiding and dodging. They don’t want to read. It has never brought them joy.

I have spend hundreds of dollars buying books for my classroom. Books by authors who focus on books about minority kids. I knew that my kids read less, even with two hours of reading, than other kids who find joy in reading. My students devoured books, because I carefully selected them. By the end of the year I achieved two victories. They told me that reading wasn’t boring and they told me I gave them the first novel they’d ever read without having to read it for a school assignment.

This research gave some great examples of activities specific to the many types of struggling readers. Readers who answer a different question than the one they asked. Readers who read fluently but don’t comprehend. Literal readers who have not yet learned to infer meaning, even with nine years in public school and in intervention programs for this specific purpose.

I want to be better at integrating technology skills and assessments, particularly research and collaborative tasks, even with limited resources and internet access. I want to be able to identify my fuzzy thinkers and my minimalists and individualize their tasks. The more I know about their specific struggles, the better I can help them. Yet, I cannot bring more computers into my class. I cannot change the fact that there are 23 students in my “intensive” reading class. I cannot make more hours in the day or keep all my distracted and discouraged students on task. I can take what I know and know what I have to do and design lessons to the best of my ability that target many skills and many types of learners and readers. And I will, with concern and caring and love.

I can answer yes to important questions about my teaching.

Do they read more than they ever have before with me as their teacher? Yes.

Do we spend our lesson time actually engaged in the text? Yes.

Do I select appropriately leveled texts? Yes.

Do I give them books to take home that they actually read independently and with joy? YES and it’s my greatest strength and what I believe to be most important.

Learning to Assess, Assessing to Learn

Assessment is still a confusing process for me. I was thrown into teaching two years ago with no prior experience and I forged ahead with passion and zest. When I have time to sit with a child one on one, I discover things that interest them and I see that they struggle. Pinpointing those struggles, however, could truly help my students. 

My first semester as a reading teacher I learned through a professional development course that upper level students who still struggle in reading usually have trouble with basic phonics skills they didn't get when they were younger. So I found a third grade phonics worksheet as a bell work, whited out where it said third grade and gave it to my students. Most of them could not complete the worksheet. I knew then that my students were not skilled at sounding out words. I had given no formal test, had no formal teaching knowledge about assessment, but I had assessed a skill and then used it to inform my instruction because we sounded out words A LOT after that.

Other times during my first year of teaching I read with my students or had them read silently and then asked comprehension questions. We would read Hunger Games and I would stop to ask questions. I stopped and asked if students could predict a word meaning based on context, or if they could sound it out appropriately by linking it to other similarly spelled words. Without even realizing it, I was more or less using an Informal Reading Inventory Process, an assessment of their reading skills through a few minutes of inquiry about their interests and understanding of what they were reading. Looking back, I knew through such informal inquiries that The Hunger Games was a book that my students did not read accurately if they were required to read independently. They got confused, they needed clarification, or they just lost interest and visibly stopped reading. Had I been better educated in assessment, I could have recorded those scores or labeled whether the students were independently proficient, at instructional level or at frustration level and used that knowledge to organize my students for small group lessons. 

I was somewhat devastated. I had imagined I would enter a room of struggling eighth graders and turn their lives into literature rich ones, with the joys of a good book osmosis-ing its way from me to them.

 

Not quite so easy. 

Assessment, I thought, was not as necessary because I didn't need a test to tell me these students were struggling. They were years behind, they were too scared to read aloud, they were badly behaved and they did not care to learn what I had to share. 

Assessment, I thought, was a bit of a waste of time. Instead I shall instill a passion for reading by being a bubbly and enthusiastic reader and reading to them, with them....for them.

Of course, the purposes of assessment are not just to tell me what I already know, that these kids cannot read well, but instead to tell me what they can do well and what particular skills need developing the most. It also would have been a great way to document their developing skills, perhaps to show them that they can and will improve. They were old enough to become self advocates for learning if they could have been shown the way. 

Hunger Games became a read aloud book in my first year reading classroom. I read to them and read to them and read to them. I put passion and engagement first. They did improve. At the end of the year, I told a student in my class that he had passed the reading FCAT and would no longer be in intensive reading.

 He said "Yo, Mizz A, stop messin' wit' me." He did not believe me. I had to repeat it.

 "Truly, you passed Bra'Shon, I'm so proud of you." I repeated

"Foreal, Mizz A?????? Heyooooooooo!!!" 

The joy for him was stifled by the sadness that while my students all improved their scores, most were so low to start with that they still were bound to continue with intensive courses. 

Had I known what to do, or had a reading coach to help, I could have given an IRI, a published assessment with questions and passages that pinpoint reading difficulties in students. I could have identified specific miscues. I could have had an exact reading level determined for each student and used it to find books that matched both their interest and ability. 

From Caldwell, I have outline excellent suggestions to keep in mind when using IRI's

• It is always better to underestimate a student's ability or go with their lowest scored result
• Concentrate on errors and miscues that affect meaning 
• Space the assessment out over several shorter sessions
• Record the session 
• Find a quiet place to assess 
• Assessment may need to be repeated
• To measure growth, use a pre and post assessment. You must know where the starting point to chart progress
• Can be adapted for group use

It was noted in the Caldwell and Leslie article that while the IRI is not the only available method to assess reading struggles, it has historically provided many teachers with a successful means of identifying the reading level of their students as compared to their grade level and therefore needs to be in every good reading teacher's cabinet of skills. I know personally I have used other methods to check fluency and identify phonics miscues, but I can see that the IRI is a more comprehensive approach, focusing on word study, fluency development and general comprehension. 

Hardworking student and creepy reindeer teacher.

The IRI outlines three general reading struggles for students in order to best plan instruction

CHALLENGES IN DECODING

• Student does not have working knowledge of the system of pronunciation in English
• Student struggled with sound/letter correspondences
• Student has trouble with BIG, multi syllable words (though I believe this can come from self doubt more than a lack of skill)

CHALLENGES IN FLUENCY

• Student does not have a repertoire of sight words
• Irregularly pronounced or spelled words a problem for student
• Student reads slowly

CHALLENGES IN COMPREHENSION

• Student does not remember/absorb the information
• Student believes comprehensions should be effortless, or does not fully understand the overall process of making meaning while reading
• Student does not have working knowledge of reading comprehension strategies

Once you have identified a student's reading level (where they can independently comprehend and accurately identify words, again using the lower of the two abilities) you should compare it to the grade level they are in. In other words, determine if your student is at the grade level reading that they should be, or are they behind in their reading skills. For me, each of my students is behind by at least two grade levels. My best students read on a 6th grade level and my lowest performers are in grade 3.  :(

Here, I have to digress from the reading because it again presses on the importance of individualized intervention for severe reading problems. For my older students, that means three years behind, which many of my students are. The realistic difficulty here is that I have a reading class of eighteen rowdy and disconnected kids in a Title-1 charter school with ZERO support staff. When I attempt to work with an individual student, I find that I cannot, because the others stop doing their work without my watchful eye.  Sometimes I get very frustrated by they simple explanations in the reading for how to fix and work with students who have reading problems, when one on one or even group interventions are functionally impossible for me because of the lack of motivation and other behavioral problems I have, as well as huge reading class sizes. It isn't intensive with twenty or more students. Argh.

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STAGES OF WORD LEARNING

• Logographic- words are understood within the context of pictures, like STOP in a big red stop sign
• Alphabetic- students begin letter/sound associations and start to understand the weird squiggles on a page represent sounds
• Automatic Word Recognition- develop strategies for unfamiliar and long words
• students can have a mix of these skills 
• Strategic reading is when they possess the ability to decode and make meaning, including determining what is important and using context to define words

READING LEVELS, WHAT THEY MEAN

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Besides the obvious, that as the reading level increases the number of unfamiliar and large words will increase, the sentences will get longer, and the pictures disappear from the page, it is important to recognize that lower elementary reading material represents topics with which small children are familiar, like pets, families, vacations, etc.

Older children are more often given material with which they are not familiar. In part, this explains the need for KWLs and pre reading connections, but in the context of assessment, we must recognize that an assessment should be given with topics that students are familiar with, so that their good reading strategies can be recognized. 

TO LOOK BACK OR NOT

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Should students who are assessed be permitted to return to the passage? As this is a strategy of a good reader, it seems the answer is yes. Assessments should include some questions which students are not permitted to return to the text and some that they are. 

If a child is not succeeded when they are allowed to return to the text, rereading is a strategic skill they need help in developing.

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STUDENT PORTFOLIOS

As a new teacher, I recognized the importance of portfolios for a student's reflection, but I'm a scatter brained mess and had a hard time putting together the most important information or staying organized enough to keep portfolios in use. I had them, but they did not really constitute the right work of a student to show progress. It was not work chosen with purpose and it did not include much reflection either by me or the student, as to progress. It was just a file or student work, not a carefully planned diagnostic tool. 

I thought of all portfolios as ownership portfolios. I believed that students should self select work to add to their portfolios, both because this took the pressure off me to file and put the ownership of the file in their hands, and because self reflection is an important skill for my students to work on. 

Through the reading I recognize that portfolios can suit different purposes. A feedback portfolio might include graded work with explanations of skills and grades, contributions made more readily by the teacher, not just a self-assessed portfolio. 

Then, of course, an accountability portfolio is a great way to keep evidence of a child's progress or my success as a teacher. Recently a teacher was accused by a parent at my school of not providing enough gifted accommodations for her child.  The principal asked the child's teachers to show evidence of such accommodations, which included the child's individual work that met the standards for gifted level learning, including a lot of critical thinking tasks. The teacher did not keep portfolios on the child and had little evidence to provide, so even if she had done everything she needed to do for that child, she had no proof. Yikes.

Through this example I witness and what was discussed in the article, I can see the purpose for both a portfolio for classroom use and one that holds accountability for meeting the demands of particular programs or rubrics and I see that they can conflicting. Two portfolios, however, is not possible in my classroom with the reality of my daily tasks. I prefer to go the route of student involvement and keep detailed anecdotal records of my general classroom success. 

Portfolios are the first thing I start with in class, doing what the article suggests, I have and will use them as a tool to make students' recognize their own learning and become meta-cognitive about their growth through a year in my classroom. 

PROS OF PORTFOLIOS

• STUDENT INVOLVEMENT
• MAKE STUDENTS' AWARE OF THEIR OWN LEARNING
• EASY TO SHARE WITH PARENTS AND ADMIN
• OPPORTUNITY TO REFLECT ON THE YEAR

DRAWBACKS

• TIME CONSUMING
• MORE PREVALENT IN LOWER GRADES/ENGLISH CLASSES, OTHER SUBJECTS LESS INTERESTED IN USING
• ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT NOT PROVEN TO BE HELPFUL IN CREATING EQUITABLE CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION
• SUBJECTIVE (WHERE IS THE ACCOUNTABILITY?)

I believe that any opportunity to involve students in something that makes them aware of their progress has enormous benefits that are more significant than potential drawbacks, though I am concerned with remaining objective and I can see how that could be difficult with a portfolio. 

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IN SUMMATION,

I lean towards informal or alternative assessments for my students because they themselves represent a fringe population in education, at-risk youth who are already turned off by the typical system of instruction and are at odds with the school culture in general. Yet, I've come to see that recognizing the specific difficulties my students face through an IRI which is published and not just an IRI process will be incredibly beneficial to the reading growth of my students and I look forward to possessing both the knowledge and the confidence about reading assessments to grow into a more effective educator. 

Students and Bookshelves.
Think, kids. Also, my aerobic step I use to see kids in the back of the room.

8th grade graduation, so cute.