In addition to the sixty lessons I am dutifully planning (ahem) each week, I'm also supposed to be taking notes on all the strategy lessons I'm doing with my small groups during independent working time in reading, writing and math. I have a sheet for every student in each subject that lists their three goals for the unit, and every time I meet with that student for a strategy lesson, I fill out a little box with the date, my teaching point, my observations of the student, other "things I notice," and whether the student has "mastered, attempted or not mastered" the teaching point.
So, let me break it down for you. Let's say I have five students who share the common goal of developing strong conclusions to their stories. And my teaching point for the strategy lesson is "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." That means for each one of those students, I'm taking out their piece of paper and writing that same teaching point in the little box. "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story."
Did that just drive you crazy to read that five times? Imagine how I feel writing it five times. I feel like Miss Brave the Trained Teacher Monkey, that's how I feel. Not to mention that I still haven't figured out how to write notes on my observations and other "things I notice" of five students while simultaneously trying to, you know, teach the lesson. Plus, keep in mind that this is one strategy lesson, for one subject, and I'm supposed to be doing two strategy lessons per day in three different subjects, which means that if each strategy lesson has five students, and I'm doing six strategy lessons a day (in an ideal teaching world, of course), I'm filling in little boxes of observations and things I notice and teaching points thirty times. Per day.
The point of all this is that I detest that sheet full of boxes that we use for writing, so I attempted to redesign it to make it work better for me. I basically took the same sheet we use for another subject, which is slightly more manageable, and modified it for writing. Then I sent it off to my AP in a groveling e-mail in which I asked permission to use my sheet instead because I thought it would work better for me. Note italics.
First let's set aside the small indignity that I had to ask permission to modify my own note-taking procedure (hello, Miss Brave the Trained Teacher Monkey). My AP e-mailed me back that she would bring it up at the next cabinet meeting (um, whatever that is) and get back to me.
Rrrrrghhh. It literally has to go before a committee before I can use it, and if the committee decides it's a good redesign, they will probably foist it upon every teacher in the school. One of my co-workers recently redesigned our reading sheets, and she said it took about a month before her design was "approved," and when it was, it was handed down to us like Moses receiving the Ten Commandments -- this was The Reading Sheet We All Had to Use.
As my colleague dryly noted, "They want us to differentiate instruction...but they don't." Seriously, all I'm trying to do is organize my own way of collecting my own data in order to drive my own instruction, but God forbid I'm not doing it in the same little boxes as everyone else. I'm starting to feel like that dude in Network.
Showing posts with label assessments and data. Show all posts
Showing posts with label assessments and data. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Monday, January 4, 2010
A better way
Aaaaaaand we're back! I left my house this morning at 6:20 am and arrived at home this evening at 6:30 pm. In between, I saw zero hours of daylight and spent nearly eleven hours straight in my classroom, punctuated by brief trips (avec class) to the cafeteria and (sans class) to the bathroom. (I read Julia Child's My Life in France over the vacation and still have Paris on the brain. In fact, I kind of wish I were there right now. Ah, c'est la vie.)
I thought I had done a good job preparing my classroom for January, and I had -- I had already (sneakily) changed over my calendars and set up the schedule. So this morning all I had to do was switch around the jobs, fill in my teaching points, print out the homework sheet, put reading logs and newsletters in the mailboxes, return the math tests, take down the chairs, pull out the new Fundations materials, take out the pre-tests, set up the unit overview -- deep breath -- you see where this is going.
Then the kids arrived. Welcome back, I had a party, I made goo, I went to the history museum, I exploded confetti, you cut your hair really short this time Miss Brave, when are we going to use the computers, next week is my dad's birthday, is the trip this week, etc.
Then the kids left, and I spent what felt like a zillion hours filing and organizing papers and grouping my kids by goal for strategy lessons, which is pretty much what I feel like I spend every waking minute of my teaching life doing. Like, did I plan any concrete lessons for the immediate future (i.e., tomorrow)? No. I spend soooo much time grouping and organizing my kids that by the time I've figured out what strategy lesson I'm going to teach them, I have no time or motivation to actually plan the lesson. Which is completely backwards, no? There has to be a better way.
I've mentioned before that we're expected to make sure each of our students has three goals for each unit in reading, writing and math. While students are working independently after the mini lesson, we're supposed to meet with two small groups for strategy lessons to help them meet these goals. What I've generally done, at least for writing and math, is create a monthly "pool" of ten goals for the class, from which I select three for an individual student. The kicker is that each goal has to be addressed three times (our lame-ass motto is "Three days, three different ways"). So, for those of you keeping score at home, that's ten goals, over three days each, hmmmm, poof, thirty lessons! Miss Brave, you may be asking, are there even thirty days in a unit (which is usually a month long)? Well, no, there are not, hence my valiant (and often futile) attempts to meet with two strategy groups per day. But guess what, sometimes it's last period and three-quarters of my class leaves for early dismissal, or sometimes it's first period and it takes seven-year-olds too long to unpack, or sometimes there's a fire drill, or I have to send someone to the nurse, or -- you see where this is going.
Meanwhile, in the car on the way home, I was boggling my own mind with the sheer volume of lessons I'm supposed to be planning. In reading, writing and math, I teach a mini lesson, and two strategy lessons, each day -- that's like three lessons per subject, or nine altogether. Plus word work, science or social studies, and a read aloud -- that's another three. So twelve altogether. Multiply that by five days in a week and that's sixty lessons a week.
I'm exhausted just thinking about it. Which is why I'm going to go eat my Monday night sushi and not think about it until it's time to get up and do it all over again.
I thought I had done a good job preparing my classroom for January, and I had -- I had already (sneakily) changed over my calendars and set up the schedule. So this morning all I had to do was switch around the jobs, fill in my teaching points, print out the homework sheet, put reading logs and newsletters in the mailboxes, return the math tests, take down the chairs, pull out the new Fundations materials, take out the pre-tests, set up the unit overview -- deep breath -- you see where this is going.
Then the kids arrived. Welcome back, I had a party, I made goo, I went to the history museum, I exploded confetti, you cut your hair really short this time Miss Brave, when are we going to use the computers, next week is my dad's birthday, is the trip this week, etc.
Then the kids left, and I spent what felt like a zillion hours filing and organizing papers and grouping my kids by goal for strategy lessons, which is pretty much what I feel like I spend every waking minute of my teaching life doing. Like, did I plan any concrete lessons for the immediate future (i.e., tomorrow)? No. I spend soooo much time grouping and organizing my kids that by the time I've figured out what strategy lesson I'm going to teach them, I have no time or motivation to actually plan the lesson. Which is completely backwards, no? There has to be a better way.
I've mentioned before that we're expected to make sure each of our students has three goals for each unit in reading, writing and math. While students are working independently after the mini lesson, we're supposed to meet with two small groups for strategy lessons to help them meet these goals. What I've generally done, at least for writing and math, is create a monthly "pool" of ten goals for the class, from which I select three for an individual student. The kicker is that each goal has to be addressed three times (our lame-ass motto is "Three days, three different ways"). So, for those of you keeping score at home, that's ten goals, over three days each, hmmmm, poof, thirty lessons! Miss Brave, you may be asking, are there even thirty days in a unit (which is usually a month long)? Well, no, there are not, hence my valiant (and often futile) attempts to meet with two strategy groups per day. But guess what, sometimes it's last period and three-quarters of my class leaves for early dismissal, or sometimes it's first period and it takes seven-year-olds too long to unpack, or sometimes there's a fire drill, or I have to send someone to the nurse, or -- you see where this is going.
Meanwhile, in the car on the way home, I was boggling my own mind with the sheer volume of lessons I'm supposed to be planning. In reading, writing and math, I teach a mini lesson, and two strategy lessons, each day -- that's like three lessons per subject, or nine altogether. Plus word work, science or social studies, and a read aloud -- that's another three. So twelve altogether. Multiply that by five days in a week and that's sixty lessons a week.
I'm exhausted just thinking about it. Which is why I'm going to go eat my Monday night sushi and not think about it until it's time to get up and do it all over again.
Friday, August 28, 2009
ARIS this
I'm willing to take bets that I am the only NYC public school teacher out there who logged into ARIS (that's the New York City Department of Education’s Achievement Reporting and Innovation System to you) before the school year started. As I was very diligently logging in to my DOE e-mail (which I have also very diligently checked over the summer, only to be sent into panicky tailspins by the missives of my principal), I was informed I had to reset my password (which the DOE makes us do practically biweekly, as if anyone is really trying to hack into my e-mail and find out which exciting coverage I'll be made to do next), and on the default home page I happened to log into ARIS out of curiosity -- at least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Sure enough, my class list is up and running, and there are changes: I lost one sweet girl and gained one (different) sweet girl, one boy I am not excited about unless he's matured a heck of a lot over the summer, and one unknown boy from another school.
Now, I am all about the lists and charts and organizational tools, but I'm already frustrated by ARIS. Maybe it's because I've got second graders, so there's not exactly that much data to go on, but almost every single data field on my students was blank, and the ones that were there are cryptic. My new student from another school has an IEP, but I can't tell what's on it. Several of my students have "health alerts," but I don't know what they are. And a handful have "closed 407s," which (because I am a huge dork) I had to research to find out what exactly that meant. (As far as I can tell, it means they were absent a lot, and the DOE investigated.) This is my third year in the system, and I don't see how I'll ever keep pace with all the acronyms and numbered abbreviations.
But all the tools we use at my school to measure student progress -- running records and Everyday Math assessments and checklists and such -- don't factor into ARIS. So pretty much all I get out of it is a list of 27 names and a record of how many days they were absent. Which doesn't do much to help ease my anxiety of what it will be like when those 27 squirmy bodies are filling my new classroom.
Sure enough, my class list is up and running, and there are changes: I lost one sweet girl and gained one (different) sweet girl, one boy I am not excited about unless he's matured a heck of a lot over the summer, and one unknown boy from another school.
Now, I am all about the lists and charts and organizational tools, but I'm already frustrated by ARIS. Maybe it's because I've got second graders, so there's not exactly that much data to go on, but almost every single data field on my students was blank, and the ones that were there are cryptic. My new student from another school has an IEP, but I can't tell what's on it. Several of my students have "health alerts," but I don't know what they are. And a handful have "closed 407s," which (because I am a huge dork) I had to research to find out what exactly that meant. (As far as I can tell, it means they were absent a lot, and the DOE investigated.) This is my third year in the system, and I don't see how I'll ever keep pace with all the acronyms and numbered abbreviations.
But all the tools we use at my school to measure student progress -- running records and Everyday Math assessments and checklists and such -- don't factor into ARIS. So pretty much all I get out of it is a list of 27 names and a record of how many days they were absent. Which doesn't do much to help ease my anxiety of what it will be like when those 27 squirmy bodies are filling my new classroom.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
The house that reading built
(Why am I writing this entry at 4:30 am? Because I'm awake battling a fever, sore throat and chills. I'm not saying I have the H1N1 virus...I'm just sayin'.)
It's running record time again, and I'm pleased to report that I moved my Polish-speaking Lukas from level D to E. He happily rushed off to "move his person" (a little stick figure with his name on it) from the D envelope to the E envelope, and then he went to the classroom library to do what we call "shopping for books." From the other side of the bookshelf, I could hear him humming busily to himself as he dumped all the D books out of his book baggie and then stashed them back in the D bin with a chirpy, "Bye-bye, D books! See ya later!"
So cute.
How is everyone else doing? Azul, who started the year at B, is now an I, and I have high hopes he'll be a J when I meet with him again next week -- which means that even though he's behind where he should be at the end of second grade, he's still made more than an entire year's worth of progress in his first full school year in America. My first L reader is now an N -- and if you're thinking N is a third grade reading level (not to mention a letter I never thought I'd see in Academic Intervention Services), you're correct!
(Last week I subbed for a class and one of the kids, who was briefly in my reading group but has since returned to his teacher's, told me I was the "bestest substitute teacher ever." Then he congratulated me on finally having M readers in my group. This kid, I swear, is like 8 going on 40.)
It's not all so rosy. Neel is still stuck at C, and probably will be until his parents finally consent to a special ed placement. It's now the end of his fifth year at our school, and he is officially my lowest reader. Even my ELLs, who arrived in this country in September with no English, are at least D readers.
My K readers are struggling to move to L. The L running record story is about some kids who put their mother's lipstick all over their face and then get the bright idea to pretend they have chicken pox so they don't have to go to school. For two days straight last week I listened to reader after reader tell me, "First they put their mother's lipstick on their face and then they got chicken pox." Aargh!
Finally, on an unrelated note: When I noticed last week that one of my students was unusually moody, I took her aside to ask what was up, and she launched into this painfully adolescent litany of woes that sounded straight out of Mean Girls, only second grade-sized. The funny thing was that it all sounded seriously familiar, as though the patterns of girl friendship haven't changed much since I was in second grade, or probably for hundreds of years. It was the same old "Ariella is supposed to be my friend but I don't understand why she's mean to me but then when I'm not around she's nice to Tara" and "Danyelis is always saying that Ariella is her first best friend and Tara is her second best friend but I'm only her third best friend." But don't fret! We, like, totally girl-talked it out and hopefully she'll be able to move on.
It's running record time again, and I'm pleased to report that I moved my Polish-speaking Lukas from level D to E. He happily rushed off to "move his person" (a little stick figure with his name on it) from the D envelope to the E envelope, and then he went to the classroom library to do what we call "shopping for books." From the other side of the bookshelf, I could hear him humming busily to himself as he dumped all the D books out of his book baggie and then stashed them back in the D bin with a chirpy, "Bye-bye, D books! See ya later!"
So cute.
How is everyone else doing? Azul, who started the year at B, is now an I, and I have high hopes he'll be a J when I meet with him again next week -- which means that even though he's behind where he should be at the end of second grade, he's still made more than an entire year's worth of progress in his first full school year in America. My first L reader is now an N -- and if you're thinking N is a third grade reading level (not to mention a letter I never thought I'd see in Academic Intervention Services), you're correct!
(Last week I subbed for a class and one of the kids, who was briefly in my reading group but has since returned to his teacher's, told me I was the "bestest substitute teacher ever." Then he congratulated me on finally having M readers in my group. This kid, I swear, is like 8 going on 40.)
It's not all so rosy. Neel is still stuck at C, and probably will be until his parents finally consent to a special ed placement. It's now the end of his fifth year at our school, and he is officially my lowest reader. Even my ELLs, who arrived in this country in September with no English, are at least D readers.
My K readers are struggling to move to L. The L running record story is about some kids who put their mother's lipstick all over their face and then get the bright idea to pretend they have chicken pox so they don't have to go to school. For two days straight last week I listened to reader after reader tell me, "First they put their mother's lipstick on their face and then they got chicken pox." Aargh!
Finally, on an unrelated note: When I noticed last week that one of my students was unusually moody, I took her aside to ask what was up, and she launched into this painfully adolescent litany of woes that sounded straight out of Mean Girls, only second grade-sized. The funny thing was that it all sounded seriously familiar, as though the patterns of girl friendship haven't changed much since I was in second grade, or probably for hundreds of years. It was the same old "Ariella is supposed to be my friend but I don't understand why she's mean to me but then when I'm not around she's nice to Tara" and "Danyelis is always saying that Ariella is her first best friend and Tara is her second best friend but I'm only her third best friend." But don't fret! We, like, totally girl-talked it out and hopefully she'll be able to move on.
Friday, March 13, 2009
This weekend is brought to me by the letter L
Ladies and gentlemen, we have our first grade-level reader.
OK, that's not entirely true. I've had kids reach grade level (and surpass it!) after transferring out of my group. And I've had kids reach grade level who started out in the teacher's group, came to my group after falling behind and ended up going back to the teacher's group. But Dalya is my first student who started with me, below grade level (although juuust barely below), at the beginning of the year who is now on grade level. (Grade level for this point in the school year for second graders is level L. Sample level L book: the Pinky and Rex series by James Howe -- can you tell I still have series books on the brain? And remember Bunnicula, also by James Howe? Anyway.)
She is my first L reader, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer kid -- first of all, the other day I moved her to K, and she's been walking around beaming and hugging her book baggie full of K books, so you can imagine how excited she was to be an L reader, and then I actually got a "Thank you for moving me to level L, Miss Brave."
In other happy running record news, Azul has moved to F. Unfortunately, he has been driving me a little crazy lately, but it is a riot to watch him read -- in the beginning of the year, he was a complete clown during running records, turning to me after each page with a huge exaggerated grin on his face as if to say, "See? I can read this!" But today he was all business, absolutely poker-faced, hunched over the book and taking deep breaths as if to pump himself up for every tricky word.
Too bad the level G texts are ridiculously hard. One is about a boy dancing at a Native American powwow...'cause my eight-year-olds who live in New York City really have the mental capacity to conceptualize a powwow. Also, he's wearing a headdress and they always think he's a girl. Today one kid told me that he was "dancing in water" because the page background happened to be blue. The other G book is about a boy whose family is moving, and he projects all his negative feelings about moving onto his pet fish, so he's all, "Flipper likes his friends and his school, he will miss them if he moves away," and then on moving day his family gets into the elevator and goes up, not down, and the boy is all, "Who lives on this floor?" and his parents are all, "We do now!" and then the kid (and his fish!) are both happy. I have read this book about fifty times and only once has a student fully understood that (a) fish don't attend school so obviously the boy is referring to himself and not Flipper and (b) the family actually just moved to another apartment in the same building so the boy is happy because he doesn't have to move away from his friends. It's not like the boy says, "Wow, this is great because this apartment must be zoned for the same school I currently attend!"
First of all, what kind of neglectful, twisted parents don't tell their sad, worried child that they are actually just moving up two flights of stairs and not, you know, out of the city? Second of all, while the boy is packing he says, "I put everything in the box except Flipper," which makes all the kids think that the boy is sad because he's not allowed to take Flipper with him to the new apartment (because the new apartment building doesn't allow fish? I don't get how their minds work either, I'm just the reading teacher). Usually I manage to interrogate the answers out of them (me: "Why doesn't the boy want to move to a new apartment?" Kid: "Because Flipper will miss his friends and his school." Me: "Do fish go to school?!" Kid: "No..." Me: "So who do you think the boy is really talking about?" Kid: "Um...himself?" Me: :::mental ding ding ding:::)
Meanwhile, the level H book is about this boy whose mother's car breaks down, so every day they try to get to school a different way but there's always some wacky problem (like they get on the wrong bus and it takes them to the beach, or they get on the ferry but it's bumpy and they feel sick), and the only inferring required is the monumentally stupid question of why the boy and his mother look so happy at the end of the story. (Actual answer: because their car is fixed. Miss Brave's personal answer: because he managed to weasel out of an entire week of school! With the consent of his hapless mother!)
I'm pretty sure this entry reflects the fact that I drank a large coffee and a caffeinated soda today, the fact that it is Friday, and the fact that I am still drowning in a vast sea of work created by our series book club unit, a unit that has me so ensnared in its clutches that I actually dreamed about it all night.
There are fifteen weeks until summer!
OK, that's not entirely true. I've had kids reach grade level (and surpass it!) after transferring out of my group. And I've had kids reach grade level who started out in the teacher's group, came to my group after falling behind and ended up going back to the teacher's group. But Dalya is my first student who started with me, below grade level (although juuust barely below), at the beginning of the year who is now on grade level. (Grade level for this point in the school year for second graders is level L. Sample level L book: the Pinky and Rex series by James Howe -- can you tell I still have series books on the brain? And remember Bunnicula, also by James Howe? Anyway.)
She is my first L reader, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer kid -- first of all, the other day I moved her to K, and she's been walking around beaming and hugging her book baggie full of K books, so you can imagine how excited she was to be an L reader, and then I actually got a "Thank you for moving me to level L, Miss Brave."
In other happy running record news, Azul has moved to F. Unfortunately, he has been driving me a little crazy lately, but it is a riot to watch him read -- in the beginning of the year, he was a complete clown during running records, turning to me after each page with a huge exaggerated grin on his face as if to say, "See? I can read this!" But today he was all business, absolutely poker-faced, hunched over the book and taking deep breaths as if to pump himself up for every tricky word.
Too bad the level G texts are ridiculously hard. One is about a boy dancing at a Native American powwow...'cause my eight-year-olds who live in New York City really have the mental capacity to conceptualize a powwow. Also, he's wearing a headdress and they always think he's a girl. Today one kid told me that he was "dancing in water" because the page background happened to be blue. The other G book is about a boy whose family is moving, and he projects all his negative feelings about moving onto his pet fish, so he's all, "Flipper likes his friends and his school, he will miss them if he moves away," and then on moving day his family gets into the elevator and goes up, not down, and the boy is all, "Who lives on this floor?" and his parents are all, "We do now!" and then the kid (and his fish!) are both happy. I have read this book about fifty times and only once has a student fully understood that (a) fish don't attend school so obviously the boy is referring to himself and not Flipper and (b) the family actually just moved to another apartment in the same building so the boy is happy because he doesn't have to move away from his friends. It's not like the boy says, "Wow, this is great because this apartment must be zoned for the same school I currently attend!"
First of all, what kind of neglectful, twisted parents don't tell their sad, worried child that they are actually just moving up two flights of stairs and not, you know, out of the city? Second of all, while the boy is packing he says, "I put everything in the box except Flipper," which makes all the kids think that the boy is sad because he's not allowed to take Flipper with him to the new apartment (because the new apartment building doesn't allow fish? I don't get how their minds work either, I'm just the reading teacher). Usually I manage to interrogate the answers out of them (me: "Why doesn't the boy want to move to a new apartment?" Kid: "Because Flipper will miss his friends and his school." Me: "Do fish go to school?!" Kid: "No..." Me: "So who do you think the boy is really talking about?" Kid: "Um...himself?" Me: :::mental ding ding ding:::)
Meanwhile, the level H book is about this boy whose mother's car breaks down, so every day they try to get to school a different way but there's always some wacky problem (like they get on the wrong bus and it takes them to the beach, or they get on the ferry but it's bumpy and they feel sick), and the only inferring required is the monumentally stupid question of why the boy and his mother look so happy at the end of the story. (Actual answer: because their car is fixed. Miss Brave's personal answer: because he managed to weasel out of an entire week of school! With the consent of his hapless mother!)
I'm pretty sure this entry reflects the fact that I drank a large coffee and a caffeinated soda today, the fact that it is Friday, and the fact that I am still drowning in a vast sea of work created by our series book club unit, a unit that has me so ensnared in its clutches that I actually dreamed about it all night.
There are fifteen weeks until summer!
Friday, January 9, 2009
The alphabet marches on
Running record time is here again! I'm actually really pleased at the progress my students are making. Several of them have moved up not one but two reading levels, and our favorite friend Azul has moved up to -- get this -- E!!!! (So you would think he would want to be an F next, right? Well, no, according to Azul, because there are no F books in his classroom library, logically he should jump right from E to G.) I have a few students who came into the year reading at F (sample text: "We're going to the car wash. Wash it, wash it, here we go!") and are now reading at J (sample text: "One winter morning Peter woke up and looked out the window. Snow had fallen during the night. It covered everything as far as he could see").
On the other hand, though, I do have a few students who are either making frustratingly slow progress or no progress at all. I have one little guy who was held over in first grade -- which makes him a year older than his classmates -- who is still reading at D. He's been reading at D for almost a year. And that's after going through first grade (which you're supposed to leave at I the first time around) twice. Compare him to Azul, who only just arrived in the country less than a year ago and has already passed him. It's such a puzzle to figure out why some kids are making such great progress and some aren't progressing at all; obviously something isn't working, but we need to figure out why that is. I honestly feel like I can't even take credit for those F-to-J jumps -- it's like for those students, something just clicked and now they've blossomed like Leo the Late Bloomer.
Of course, even my J students are still below grade level, and at this point I'm starting to worry that some of my lower kids aren't going to catch up. I have one little girl at a G who is one of my sweetest and most hard-working students; unfortunately, she is struggling a lot and has extremely low self-confidence. Her brother tells her that she is stupid and won't make it to third grade, and I'm genuinely concerned that she won't make it to third grade -- not at a level G -- and that will totally destroy her. I'm convinced she has a learning disability -- she has really severe letter reversals -- but by the time the referral paperwork goes through, she'll probably be on her way to repeating second grade anyway, and I just think that will totally crush her. She's one of those students who just kills you because she tries so hard but it just doesn't click. I so don't want her to be held back. It's just that all my students need so much, how can there ever be enough time in the day to help them all?
On the other hand, though, I do have a few students who are either making frustratingly slow progress or no progress at all. I have one little guy who was held over in first grade -- which makes him a year older than his classmates -- who is still reading at D. He's been reading at D for almost a year. And that's after going through first grade (which you're supposed to leave at I the first time around) twice. Compare him to Azul, who only just arrived in the country less than a year ago and has already passed him. It's such a puzzle to figure out why some kids are making such great progress and some aren't progressing at all; obviously something isn't working, but we need to figure out why that is. I honestly feel like I can't even take credit for those F-to-J jumps -- it's like for those students, something just clicked and now they've blossomed like Leo the Late Bloomer.
Of course, even my J students are still below grade level, and at this point I'm starting to worry that some of my lower kids aren't going to catch up. I have one little girl at a G who is one of my sweetest and most hard-working students; unfortunately, she is struggling a lot and has extremely low self-confidence. Her brother tells her that she is stupid and won't make it to third grade, and I'm genuinely concerned that she won't make it to third grade -- not at a level G -- and that will totally destroy her. I'm convinced she has a learning disability -- she has really severe letter reversals -- but by the time the referral paperwork goes through, she'll probably be on her way to repeating second grade anyway, and I just think that will totally crush her. She's one of those students who just kills you because she tries so hard but it just doesn't click. I so don't want her to be held back. It's just that all my students need so much, how can there ever be enough time in the day to help them all?
Friday, December 26, 2008
Accomplishing my goals
I was up at 5 am on Christmas morning. I don't celebrate Christmas, so it wasn't because I was excited for the holiday; I just couldn't sleep any longer. So I figured, as long as I was up, that I would get to work on those dratted goals. (I would like anyone who says that teachers are whiners who get so much vacation to keep this in mind: At 5 am on Christmas morning, I was working on school.)
...and it wasn't so bad. My first class had taken me two hours, and I ended up with wildly disparate goals for all my students and began to freak out. I figured that at that rate, it would take me ten hours to do all my classes and I would end up with 150 goals, and that was just for the month of January. But once I got rolling, it took about three and a half hours to do all my classes (plus that first class, which I re-did), and although there are a lot of different goals, at least some of them do overlap.
Some of the commenters on my last post had advised me to give all of my students the same goal. This is impossible, as administration had specifically told us not to do this. But there is overlap among my students -- those who don't speak English, for instance, have the similar goals of learning English vocabulary. I even went out on a limb for a few of my troublesome friends and gave them the goal of "voluntarily reading just-right books" -- if a kid sits with his hands over his ears every time you try to get him to read, shouldn't voluntarily reading be priority #1? In that sense I think this new "goals" push will be a good thing; it's almost like it's giving me permission to work with my students on what they actually need, not what the second grade standards checklist says they should need.
One commenter suggested that I align next month's goals with what I'm teaching for the month. Ahhh, this is a problem I didn't even mention last time. See, these standards that we're working with to set our goals -- they're first-grade standards. We're teaching second grade material in our mini lessons, and then using our strategy lessons to catch our students up on first grade standards. So what we teach in our mini lessons doesn't align with the goals we're setting for our students, which is a whole other sticking point on this new "goals" issue. We're basically saying to our kids in the mini lesson, "We're teaching you this, now go off and practice, but by the way you've got these three goals to work on that have nothing to do with what you just taught, and we'll probably never meet to review what we just taught anyway." So we're all wondering why our unit checklists don't align with the new standards, but rather with the Teachers College units of study.
And the other issue is that I've been saying for months that the TC units don't align with the lower-level books my students are reading -- you can't really practice "noticing when your characters go on an internal journey" when you're reading D or E or F books and there's one character who's obviously not going on any kind of journey -- and I'm always shot down with, "We're not going to dumb anything down for our kids." In my mind, it's not "dumbing down," it's simply making sure that the strategies and skills I'm teaching them are things they can use at their own level. When I taught them skills for tackling tricky words, that helped them. When I taught them how to retell stories using sequence words, that helped them. When I taught them how to infer by paying attention to the characters' actions and decisions? That did not so much help them. Not because I don't think they're capable of practicing that skill, but because it doesn't apply to the books that they're reading. So I finally got permission to use the first grade checklist with my ELLs, but only with my ELLs, which didn't make that much sense to me because I have some ELL students who are higher level readers than some of my non-ELL students; to me the major issue is with the level of their books, not with their ELL status. But "We're not dumbing anything down for general ed kids!"
Except that meanwhile, our entire revamping of the literacy block is based off the first grade standards. New York City public school teachers, am I right that you cannot make this stuff up?
...and it wasn't so bad. My first class had taken me two hours, and I ended up with wildly disparate goals for all my students and began to freak out. I figured that at that rate, it would take me ten hours to do all my classes and I would end up with 150 goals, and that was just for the month of January. But once I got rolling, it took about three and a half hours to do all my classes (plus that first class, which I re-did), and although there are a lot of different goals, at least some of them do overlap.
Some of the commenters on my last post had advised me to give all of my students the same goal. This is impossible, as administration had specifically told us not to do this. But there is overlap among my students -- those who don't speak English, for instance, have the similar goals of learning English vocabulary. I even went out on a limb for a few of my troublesome friends and gave them the goal of "voluntarily reading just-right books" -- if a kid sits with his hands over his ears every time you try to get him to read, shouldn't voluntarily reading be priority #1? In that sense I think this new "goals" push will be a good thing; it's almost like it's giving me permission to work with my students on what they actually need, not what the second grade standards checklist says they should need.
One commenter suggested that I align next month's goals with what I'm teaching for the month. Ahhh, this is a problem I didn't even mention last time. See, these standards that we're working with to set our goals -- they're first-grade standards. We're teaching second grade material in our mini lessons, and then using our strategy lessons to catch our students up on first grade standards. So what we teach in our mini lessons doesn't align with the goals we're setting for our students, which is a whole other sticking point on this new "goals" issue. We're basically saying to our kids in the mini lesson, "We're teaching you this, now go off and practice, but by the way you've got these three goals to work on that have nothing to do with what you just taught, and we'll probably never meet to review what we just taught anyway." So we're all wondering why our unit checklists don't align with the new standards, but rather with the Teachers College units of study.
And the other issue is that I've been saying for months that the TC units don't align with the lower-level books my students are reading -- you can't really practice "noticing when your characters go on an internal journey" when you're reading D or E or F books and there's one character who's obviously not going on any kind of journey -- and I'm always shot down with, "We're not going to dumb anything down for our kids." In my mind, it's not "dumbing down," it's simply making sure that the strategies and skills I'm teaching them are things they can use at their own level. When I taught them skills for tackling tricky words, that helped them. When I taught them how to retell stories using sequence words, that helped them. When I taught them how to infer by paying attention to the characters' actions and decisions? That did not so much help them. Not because I don't think they're capable of practicing that skill, but because it doesn't apply to the books that they're reading. So I finally got permission to use the first grade checklist with my ELLs, but only with my ELLs, which didn't make that much sense to me because I have some ELL students who are higher level readers than some of my non-ELL students; to me the major issue is with the level of their books, not with their ELL status. But "We're not dumbing anything down for general ed kids!"
Except that meanwhile, our entire revamping of the literacy block is based off the first grade standards. New York City public school teachers, am I right that you cannot make this stuff up?
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Right now my only goal is remaining sane
GAAAAH.
It's the last day of school before winter vacation, and I don't even know how to begin to describe the utter madness that went down at school today.
We just found out that, starting the second week we return from vacation, we are going to need to keep track of individual "goals" for each student in every subject. Initially, because I can be a reasonable person, I thought this sounded like a good idea. I mean, I think it's good for my students to have goals. I think it's good for my students to know what those goals are. I think it's good to attempt to plan strategy lessons that address those goals. I even think it's good to keep track of those goals on paper so that students know what they're working toward. Goals + instruction = progress, so what's not to like?
But, like everything else in my freaking school, the goal project is going to be monstrous. First we need to choose one long-term goal for each student ("By June, Amy will move from level C to level I in reading"). Then, for each month, we need to choose three specific goals, based on this list of standards we were given. From now on, instead of pulling our strategy groups together based on our checklist of Teachers College teaching points from the month, we'll be doing strategy lessons from this set of goals.
Here are the problems with this.
* As we draw up our goals, we're going to be asked for proof in the data we've already collected that this student is lacking in a certain area. But for the first four months of the year, we weren't working on meeting those standards, we were working on meeting entirely different standards. So there isn't necessarily something in my notes that says that a student was deficient in a certain standard because I wasn't trying to get them to meet that standard, I was trying to get them to meet a different standard!
* I have 50 students. I need to write three goals for each of them. That's 150 goals, just for the month of January. There is absolutely no conceivable way I can address each of those goals in January; even if we weren't doing running records and the TC assessment and the ELA exam, there wouldn't be enough time. So those goals will probably get pushed over to February, which just means a lot of extra paperwork writing the same thing over and over again.
* Each student is supposed to have three goals in every subject and be able to articulate those goals. That's five major subjects (reading, writing, math, science and social studies), which is fifteen goals for each student. To me, that sounds like a lot of goals. I mean, hello, I have students who don't even know their own last name, let alone the goal they're working towards in reading. I don't understand why we have to start with three goals. Can't we pilot it with one and see how it goes?
* We also need to come up with a way to assess each goal at the end of each month. Most of our goals can be assessed most easily using running records and our TC assessments, so does that mean we need to do that for every student every month? How on earth are we going to have enough time to (1) meet with our students one-on-one to address their goals and (2) assess three goals per student per month?
Why are we doing all this? Not because we think it will benefit our students, but because the Quality Review says so. Seriously, my principal never once told us that she thought this would be a good idea -- it was all, "This is what the Quality Review wants, we need to make sure we have this in place for Quality Review." It's like the system-wide equivalent of teaching to the test -- like we're seriously going to drill our students on remembering their goals so they can articulate them if a Quality Reviewer happens to interrogate them.
I have such mixed feelings about this because I really do think that it can be a good idea, but I resent the way it was presented to us and the way we're putting it in place. First of all, I now have to spend my winter break writing 150 goals for my students. Today it took me two hours to finish one class. And I was surprised, and worried, to discover that there really isn't much overlap among the goals. My students really do need to work on different things. And I have always tried to give them that message, informally, when I meet with them in conferences: "What you really need to work on is being able to tell me what happened in your story, in order," I might say. But what we're expected to do now is take that goal and (1) write it in kid-friendly language so our students have a written record of what they should be working on, (2) phrase it in terms of our standards on that student's individual goal sheet, (3) plan individual conferences to address each student's specific goals and (4) assess each student's specific goals -- and all of this happens every month!
Just to put the paperwork in perspective: I already have a checklist that goes with my mini lesson, so that every day when I teach the mini lesson I check off whether or not the student mastered the teaching point. Then I meet with a group for guided reading, during which I fill out another guided reading checklist and also take notes on what I observe. Then I meet with another group for a strategy lesson based on a previous month's checklist, during which I fill out a label for each student writing what I observe and whether or not they mastered the teaching point, after which I go back to the checklist for that month and check off whether they've mastered the teaching point since the first time I taught it. And then, every two months or so, I do a running record on every student, plus write a label to go along with the running record, in addition to the TC assessment, plus a written label to go along with that.
Oh my Lord, I think I might be breaking out in hives. There was definitely a little bit of pandemonium in the air at school -- we all asked a million questions of our administrators, and they had no answers for us other than, "That's a good question, write that down." The thing is, we're putting this in place for Quality Review next year, so what is the rush to get it all started the second week after winter break? They didn't give us any uniform system or concrete answers on how to go about doing this (which, by the way, is totally and completely different from the system we've been using up until now), and yet they're expecting to see us doing this the week after we get back. At which point I guarantee you that we'll be told that we're all doing it wrong and changes need to be made, because the administration in my school would rather jump blindfolded into the deep end rather than dip their toes in the shallow end of the pool first. It's really too bad that our principal sucks, our UFT rep really sucks and our literacy coach really, really sucks.
I was so overwhelmed I didn't even walk out of school excited about winter break; I walked out freaking out about everything I have to do over vacation that will probably need to be totally revamped once we get back.
Other highlights from the last day of school before winter break:
* I sneakily conducted a battery of running records in order to push some of my students to the next level before the vacation in the hopes that when they come back in January, they'll be ready to move up again!
* Santa Claus came to visit my students and gave them candy canes. Then we all had to pose for a picture in which we said, "Merry Christmas!" No one mentioned the fact that actually, it was Hanukkah.
* Administration conducted surprise observations. For full periods. On the last day of school before vacation. That settles it: They are officially evil.
* In the middle of a running record, another student came up to me and announced that his reading partner had written him a post-it. He presented the offending post-it; there was a picture of a tiny box below the words, "This is the siz [size] of your d--k" (except as you can imagine, on the actual post-it that last word was spelled out). The accused student insisted that his accuser was the culprit. Then the accuser's story changed and all of a sudden the post-it had mysteriously been found in the center of the desk and nobody knew who had written it. So while Santa Claus was handing out candy canes, I sidled up to the classroom teacher and hissed, "Would you recognize handwriting?" So we pulled out their writing folders and rifled through them, literally saying things like, "Look at that K! The Ks match!"
* Someone in my office requested a whole bunch of copies of reading texts for her next unit. She got her copy folder back with a note posted on it that informed her that teachers would need to supply their own paper. Jigga-whaaaat?! I guess this shouldn't be surprising, as there isn't enough money in the budget for chart paper, either.
You know, I thought I could squeeze one more year out of this teaching career, but now? I'm not so sure.
It's the last day of school before winter vacation, and I don't even know how to begin to describe the utter madness that went down at school today.
We just found out that, starting the second week we return from vacation, we are going to need to keep track of individual "goals" for each student in every subject. Initially, because I can be a reasonable person, I thought this sounded like a good idea. I mean, I think it's good for my students to have goals. I think it's good for my students to know what those goals are. I think it's good to attempt to plan strategy lessons that address those goals. I even think it's good to keep track of those goals on paper so that students know what they're working toward. Goals + instruction = progress, so what's not to like?
But, like everything else in my freaking school, the goal project is going to be monstrous. First we need to choose one long-term goal for each student ("By June, Amy will move from level C to level I in reading"). Then, for each month, we need to choose three specific goals, based on this list of standards we were given. From now on, instead of pulling our strategy groups together based on our checklist of Teachers College teaching points from the month, we'll be doing strategy lessons from this set of goals.
Here are the problems with this.
* As we draw up our goals, we're going to be asked for proof in the data we've already collected that this student is lacking in a certain area. But for the first four months of the year, we weren't working on meeting those standards, we were working on meeting entirely different standards. So there isn't necessarily something in my notes that says that a student was deficient in a certain standard because I wasn't trying to get them to meet that standard, I was trying to get them to meet a different standard!
* I have 50 students. I need to write three goals for each of them. That's 150 goals, just for the month of January. There is absolutely no conceivable way I can address each of those goals in January; even if we weren't doing running records and the TC assessment and the ELA exam, there wouldn't be enough time. So those goals will probably get pushed over to February, which just means a lot of extra paperwork writing the same thing over and over again.
* Each student is supposed to have three goals in every subject and be able to articulate those goals. That's five major subjects (reading, writing, math, science and social studies), which is fifteen goals for each student. To me, that sounds like a lot of goals. I mean, hello, I have students who don't even know their own last name, let alone the goal they're working towards in reading. I don't understand why we have to start with three goals. Can't we pilot it with one and see how it goes?
* We also need to come up with a way to assess each goal at the end of each month. Most of our goals can be assessed most easily using running records and our TC assessments, so does that mean we need to do that for every student every month? How on earth are we going to have enough time to (1) meet with our students one-on-one to address their goals and (2) assess three goals per student per month?
Why are we doing all this? Not because we think it will benefit our students, but because the Quality Review says so. Seriously, my principal never once told us that she thought this would be a good idea -- it was all, "This is what the Quality Review wants, we need to make sure we have this in place for Quality Review." It's like the system-wide equivalent of teaching to the test -- like we're seriously going to drill our students on remembering their goals so they can articulate them if a Quality Reviewer happens to interrogate them.
I have such mixed feelings about this because I really do think that it can be a good idea, but I resent the way it was presented to us and the way we're putting it in place. First of all, I now have to spend my winter break writing 150 goals for my students. Today it took me two hours to finish one class. And I was surprised, and worried, to discover that there really isn't much overlap among the goals. My students really do need to work on different things. And I have always tried to give them that message, informally, when I meet with them in conferences: "What you really need to work on is being able to tell me what happened in your story, in order," I might say. But what we're expected to do now is take that goal and (1) write it in kid-friendly language so our students have a written record of what they should be working on, (2) phrase it in terms of our standards on that student's individual goal sheet, (3) plan individual conferences to address each student's specific goals and (4) assess each student's specific goals -- and all of this happens every month!
Just to put the paperwork in perspective: I already have a checklist that goes with my mini lesson, so that every day when I teach the mini lesson I check off whether or not the student mastered the teaching point. Then I meet with a group for guided reading, during which I fill out another guided reading checklist and also take notes on what I observe. Then I meet with another group for a strategy lesson based on a previous month's checklist, during which I fill out a label for each student writing what I observe and whether or not they mastered the teaching point, after which I go back to the checklist for that month and check off whether they've mastered the teaching point since the first time I taught it. And then, every two months or so, I do a running record on every student, plus write a label to go along with the running record, in addition to the TC assessment, plus a written label to go along with that.
Oh my Lord, I think I might be breaking out in hives. There was definitely a little bit of pandemonium in the air at school -- we all asked a million questions of our administrators, and they had no answers for us other than, "That's a good question, write that down." The thing is, we're putting this in place for Quality Review next year, so what is the rush to get it all started the second week after winter break? They didn't give us any uniform system or concrete answers on how to go about doing this (which, by the way, is totally and completely different from the system we've been using up until now), and yet they're expecting to see us doing this the week after we get back. At which point I guarantee you that we'll be told that we're all doing it wrong and changes need to be made, because the administration in my school would rather jump blindfolded into the deep end rather than dip their toes in the shallow end of the pool first. It's really too bad that our principal sucks, our UFT rep really sucks and our literacy coach really, really sucks.
I was so overwhelmed I didn't even walk out of school excited about winter break; I walked out freaking out about everything I have to do over vacation that will probably need to be totally revamped once we get back.
Other highlights from the last day of school before winter break:
* I sneakily conducted a battery of running records in order to push some of my students to the next level before the vacation in the hopes that when they come back in January, they'll be ready to move up again!
* Santa Claus came to visit my students and gave them candy canes. Then we all had to pose for a picture in which we said, "Merry Christmas!" No one mentioned the fact that actually, it was Hanukkah.
* Administration conducted surprise observations. For full periods. On the last day of school before vacation. That settles it: They are officially evil.
* In the middle of a running record, another student came up to me and announced that his reading partner had written him a post-it. He presented the offending post-it; there was a picture of a tiny box below the words, "This is the siz [size] of your d--k" (except as you can imagine, on the actual post-it that last word was spelled out). The accused student insisted that his accuser was the culprit. Then the accuser's story changed and all of a sudden the post-it had mysteriously been found in the center of the desk and nobody knew who had written it. So while Santa Claus was handing out candy canes, I sidled up to the classroom teacher and hissed, "Would you recognize handwriting?" So we pulled out their writing folders and rifled through them, literally saying things like, "Look at that K! The Ks match!"
* Someone in my office requested a whole bunch of copies of reading texts for her next unit. She got her copy folder back with a note posted on it that informed her that teachers would need to supply their own paper. Jigga-whaaaat?! I guess this shouldn't be surprising, as there isn't enough money in the budget for chart paper, either.
You know, I thought I could squeeze one more year out of this teaching career, but now? I'm not so sure.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
The saga continues!
I wish I were talking about some great movie sequel, but I am referring, of course, to our assessments. As you know, loyal readers, I spent the majority of November working like a dog to administer and grade these assessments, despite the fact that we had neither entered nor analyzed nor utilized the data from the last round of assessments. And, against all odds, I prevailed!
Or, so I thought. This morning we had a meeting at which we were told we would have to re-enter each student's individual results onto a class summary sheet. Had we, in fact, already done this? Yes! But when we asked what happened to the last summary sheet, we were dismissed with a curt, "I don't know."
Um. So okay, let's review. As part of my job, I did the following:
1. Administered the assessment to each individual student.
2. Graded the assessment of each individual student.
3. Entered the assessment of each individual student onto a class composite summary sheet.
4. Handed off the data to people who are supposed to be in charge of entering it into the computer.
And those people, as part of their jobs, did the following:
1. Lost my data.
Now, I would say that I learned An Important Lesson from this, the lesson being Always Make a Copy of Important Things Before You Hand Them In, but my school has an even more important lesson for me, this lesson being The Copy Machine Is Always Broken.
Immediately after this meeting, as if the universe knew I was already having such a fabulous day, the wheel fell off my easel. Now, you may remember that I already experienced this problem earlier in the year, and you are right -- but that was a different easel. At this point, all the easels are broken. They are lined up in the hallway, all sad and crooked and tipped to one side. I do not know what I am going to do without my easel. I don't even want to turn to DonorsChoose.org for a new one, because the truth is that I hate that stupid easel. It just barely fits through doorways, so when it goes awry, as it frequently does, I usually end up smashing my hand against the doorway. Today, when the wheel fell off, the whole easel tipped to the side and came down on my foot. Did it hurt? Yes. Did I manage to keep from exclaiming an unsavory word in front of my students? Yes! Thank goodness for small victories.
Or, so I thought. This morning we had a meeting at which we were told we would have to re-enter each student's individual results onto a class summary sheet. Had we, in fact, already done this? Yes! But when we asked what happened to the last summary sheet, we were dismissed with a curt, "I don't know."
Um. So okay, let's review. As part of my job, I did the following:
1. Administered the assessment to each individual student.
2. Graded the assessment of each individual student.
3. Entered the assessment of each individual student onto a class composite summary sheet.
4. Handed off the data to people who are supposed to be in charge of entering it into the computer.
And those people, as part of their jobs, did the following:
1. Lost my data.
Now, I would say that I learned An Important Lesson from this, the lesson being Always Make a Copy of Important Things Before You Hand Them In, but my school has an even more important lesson for me, this lesson being The Copy Machine Is Always Broken.
Immediately after this meeting, as if the universe knew I was already having such a fabulous day, the wheel fell off my easel. Now, you may remember that I already experienced this problem earlier in the year, and you are right -- but that was a different easel. At this point, all the easels are broken. They are lined up in the hallway, all sad and crooked and tipped to one side. I do not know what I am going to do without my easel. I don't even want to turn to DonorsChoose.org for a new one, because the truth is that I hate that stupid easel. It just barely fits through doorways, so when it goes awry, as it frequently does, I usually end up smashing my hand against the doorway. Today, when the wheel fell off, the whole easel tipped to the side and came down on my foot. Did it hurt? Yes. Did I manage to keep from exclaiming an unsavory word in front of my students? Yes! Thank goodness for small victories.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
C is not for cookie
Yesterday my AP came to see me. I was wary, because I thought she was coming to switch around my reading groups, but it wasn't that. Instead, it was worse: She came to ask me why some of my kids' reading levels didn't go up.
She was especially interested in my students who are still reading at level B, who are primarily non-English speakers. She kept asking if I was sure they weren't ready for C, as if I wasn't keeping track of their abilities and they had magically developed a robust sight word vocabulary and decoding skills overnight. She also made it seem like since they do have one-to-one correspondence, they should be ready for C books. But in my opinion, the leap from B to C requires the biggest jump in reading ability. At level B, all they have to be able to do is match the number of words. For example, if the book reads, "We play music," and the child says, "I love reading," the child is correct! Simply because they know that there are three distinct words on the page. (Believe it or not, this is a huge and difficult skill for kids to master.) But in order to read level C books independently, we expect them to read the words accurately. My English language learners have one-to-one correspondence and they can even memorize the patterns in their books, but they still cannot decode, they don't possess any sight word vocabulary, and they can't answer comprehension questions because they don't understand English.
Then she started in on my students who have been stuck at the same reading level since last year. Before I tell you what she said, let me first make it clear that this has been a crusade of mine since our last round of running records. I made a list of all of my students whose levels didn't change and I posted it up next to my desk. I went through each individual running record, took notes on the exact skills that seem to be holding them back from reaching the next level, and started doing strategy lessons based on those skills. At the time it seemed really daring -- checklists be damned!
So then yesterday my AP was like, "I think you need to look into what's holding them back from reaching the next level. You might need to teach them explicitly those skills. Maybe look at their running records and plan some strategy lessons."
I don't know if I should have been...but I felt a little insulted. First of all, I have yet to be observed this year by my AP, and it's not like we have regular meetings where we plan and discuss these things. So to have her tell me I should be doing something that in actuality I have been working my butt off on, which she would know if we communicated more, was disheartening. In addition to the fact that I felt a little like I was being interrogated in the first place as to why my kids aren't moving up in a way that made it seem like I didn't know them and their abilities well enough to be able to explain myself. As if I would sit there and say, "Hey, what the heck! Sure, let's bump her to C!"
Meanwhile, my colleagues tell me that Teachers College is adamantly against rushing kids through the reading levels, but that my administration has been doing this kind of "Why aren't your kids moving?" interrogation for years.
She was especially interested in my students who are still reading at level B, who are primarily non-English speakers. She kept asking if I was sure they weren't ready for C, as if I wasn't keeping track of their abilities and they had magically developed a robust sight word vocabulary and decoding skills overnight. She also made it seem like since they do have one-to-one correspondence, they should be ready for C books. But in my opinion, the leap from B to C requires the biggest jump in reading ability. At level B, all they have to be able to do is match the number of words. For example, if the book reads, "We play music," and the child says, "I love reading," the child is correct! Simply because they know that there are three distinct words on the page. (Believe it or not, this is a huge and difficult skill for kids to master.) But in order to read level C books independently, we expect them to read the words accurately. My English language learners have one-to-one correspondence and they can even memorize the patterns in their books, but they still cannot decode, they don't possess any sight word vocabulary, and they can't answer comprehension questions because they don't understand English.
Then she started in on my students who have been stuck at the same reading level since last year. Before I tell you what she said, let me first make it clear that this has been a crusade of mine since our last round of running records. I made a list of all of my students whose levels didn't change and I posted it up next to my desk. I went through each individual running record, took notes on the exact skills that seem to be holding them back from reaching the next level, and started doing strategy lessons based on those skills. At the time it seemed really daring -- checklists be damned!
So then yesterday my AP was like, "I think you need to look into what's holding them back from reaching the next level. You might need to teach them explicitly those skills. Maybe look at their running records and plan some strategy lessons."
I don't know if I should have been...but I felt a little insulted. First of all, I have yet to be observed this year by my AP, and it's not like we have regular meetings where we plan and discuss these things. So to have her tell me I should be doing something that in actuality I have been working my butt off on, which she would know if we communicated more, was disheartening. In addition to the fact that I felt a little like I was being interrogated in the first place as to why my kids aren't moving up in a way that made it seem like I didn't know them and their abilities well enough to be able to explain myself. As if I would sit there and say, "Hey, what the heck! Sure, let's bump her to C!"
Meanwhile, my colleagues tell me that Teachers College is adamantly against rushing kids through the reading levels, but that my administration has been doing this kind of "Why aren't your kids moving?" interrogation for years.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Losing it
Yesterday, for only the second time this school year, I cried in school. Wait, it gets better! I cried over a big ol' pile of data. Wait, it gets better! I cried over a big ol' pile of data in front of a science teacher!
OK, let's back this train up. For reasons unknown to everyone outside administration, our school assigned a science teacher and a technology teacher to input all our...literacy data. As you might recall, we administered the first round of assessments (which consisted of a spelling test, which we gave to the whole class at one time, and a list of sight words, which we gave individually) at the beginning of October. Then we sat on the data for a month (in my case, I literally sat on the data, because I had nowhere to keep it but in a pile under my desk, where I hoped the roaches wouldn't get it), when we were told it needed to be graded and turned in by the end of the week. Which I dutifully did, even though it meant grading 100 spelling tests round-the-clock for days.
I handed in all my data, and it was given back to me with a post-it stuck to it that read, "Keep these results." Then one day, in the middle of first period, we heard an announcement on the loudspeaker: "Please send all your assessment results down to the main office immediately." So I scurried back to my office to get all the data, quietly steaming about it because my big pile of papers still had that "Keep these results" post-it stuck on it!
So now someone else had my data. And apparently they sat on it for a while, because last week we found out that we would need to administer the second round of assessments...even though we had never (a) entered the data from the first round, (b) looked at the data from the first round, (c) analyzed the data from the first round or (d) used the data from the first round to plan our instruction in preparation for the second round.
The problem with this (well, besides the four major problems outlined above) is that I needed my data from the first round to give the second round! So I asked for it back, and shocker of shockers, I actually received it! Except then the science teacher and the technology teacher kept coming after me and asking for it again, which was puzzling to me because (a) what was being done with it all the time I didn't have it? and (b) what kind of genius minds would expect three different teachers to be able to do different things with the same data booklets at the same time? (Hmm, let's not even attempt to answer that question.) One enchanted afternoon during my prep, the technology teacher and I actually almost came to a physical tussle over the stupid sight word booklets:
(Scene: My office. Seventh period. Players: Miss Brave and Mrs. Impatient, the technology teacher.)
Mrs. Impatient: "Hi. I need your word lists."
Miss Brave: "I know, it's just that I'm using them this week, because we're using the same booklet for this round, so I can't test them if I don't have the booklets."
Mrs. Impatient: "Okay, are you using them now?"
Miss Brave: "Yeah, we're doing it this week."
Mrs. Impatient, giving me a 'duh' look and indicating the room around us: "No, I mean...are you using them right now?"
I let her have them, but I practically made her swear an oath in blood that she would return them to me by the next morning, and as I did so I thought: Dear God, what have I become?!
Anyway, I'm getting to the part with the crying! So all week long, Mrs. Impatient and the science teacher (let's call her Mrs. Condescending) have been coming after me (usually at wildly inopportune times like while I'm pushing my easel of doom down the hallway or while I'm -- no lie -- in the middle of teaching a class) to ask me for, say, Edmund's spelling assessment or Dara's word list. I have more than 50 students, so of course I have no idea off the top of my head, so I have to go searching through my giant pile of data, which is wildly disorganized (as you may guess, as a teacher, I hate feeling wildly disorganized), and sometimes I can't find what they're looking for. To be honest, we gave those assessments almost two months ago, and it's been through so many hands since then, that I'm not sure whether it was never administered in the first place, whether I had it and then lost it, whether they had it and lost it, whether the classroom teacher has it instead...you get the picture. And to be further honest, it has yet to be explained to me how this data is going to be used to help us drive our instruction, because our school is like a crazy funhouse where we're constantly being asked to do things without anyone bothering to explain to us why they're necessary, as if administration has some secret master plan that can only be revealed to us a little at a time, so I don't think anyone is exactly feeling doubly motivated to get it done.
Anyway, yesterday Mrs. Condescending launched into one of her helpful suggestions about how this time around I should make sure that all my students are given each section of the assessment and how I should consider making copies of the assessments before I hand them in and...I lost it. I just broke down and teared up in front of my giant pile of paper: "I understand that, but it's just that I have so many students, I cannot make copies of all of this paper, and then it amounts to doing the same work four times, because first I have to grade it on these individual sheets, and then I have to add all the same information to the classroom composite sheet, and now you're telling me to keep another separate grading sheet, and then you and Mrs. Impatient enter all the data, and we're all doing the same work, and some of my students were absent during the spelling test, but it takes a whole period to do the re-test, plus I have to test all my kids again on the word assessment because none of them mastered it the first time, but it's impossible to do that and the spelling assessment when the information is due on Monday and I haven't filled out the composite sheets yet!"
And then, to my surprise, Mrs. Condescending vented right back at me: "Look, I'm a science teacher, I don't even know why I'm doing this, Mrs. Impatient and I are going crazy upstairs trying to enter all the data and track down every piece of missing information, and all the work I have to do has to be done outside of school, and you're not the only one missing information, so don't feel bad, every class has missing information, and I'm just the messenger, I'm just saying that when the data gets entered and the administrators see that there are students missing information..."
You get the picture. Basically, it boils down to everyone at school losing their minds. Where is our literacy coach while this is going on? No one knows! Where are our administrators? They're walking around the school launching surprise observations on a Friday the day after everyone was at school until after 8 pm for parent-teacher conferences! (Which, side note, comes on the heels of the world's most depressing faculty meeting this week; there were three items on the agenda, and it boiled down to (1) The school neighborhood is getting more dangerous, so don't park too far away after dark, (2) We have no more money in the budget for anything, so don't expect any paper and don't get sick because we can't afford subs and (3) Remember how we thought our school would be well-developed on the Quality Review? Well, they changed the Quality Review standards and surprise! We're actually underdeveloped.) I was so fed up that at lunch I went out and spent $22 of my own money to buy color-coded file folders for each class and then stayed late at school creating meticulous checklists to ensure that my data is well-organized and my behind is well-covered in case of mix-ups.
I have already sworn up and down that I am not taking that data out of its folder for anyone. If Joel Klein himself wants to see Alejandro's latest sight word assessment, he can come to my office and comb through the whole beautifully arranged folder. He would probably have to go through Mrs. Impatient and Mrs. Condescending first, though.
OK, let's back this train up. For reasons unknown to everyone outside administration, our school assigned a science teacher and a technology teacher to input all our...literacy data. As you might recall, we administered the first round of assessments (which consisted of a spelling test, which we gave to the whole class at one time, and a list of sight words, which we gave individually) at the beginning of October. Then we sat on the data for a month (in my case, I literally sat on the data, because I had nowhere to keep it but in a pile under my desk, where I hoped the roaches wouldn't get it), when we were told it needed to be graded and turned in by the end of the week. Which I dutifully did, even though it meant grading 100 spelling tests round-the-clock for days.
I handed in all my data, and it was given back to me with a post-it stuck to it that read, "Keep these results." Then one day, in the middle of first period, we heard an announcement on the loudspeaker: "Please send all your assessment results down to the main office immediately." So I scurried back to my office to get all the data, quietly steaming about it because my big pile of papers still had that "Keep these results" post-it stuck on it!
So now someone else had my data. And apparently they sat on it for a while, because last week we found out that we would need to administer the second round of assessments...even though we had never (a) entered the data from the first round, (b) looked at the data from the first round, (c) analyzed the data from the first round or (d) used the data from the first round to plan our instruction in preparation for the second round.
The problem with this (well, besides the four major problems outlined above) is that I needed my data from the first round to give the second round! So I asked for it back, and shocker of shockers, I actually received it! Except then the science teacher and the technology teacher kept coming after me and asking for it again, which was puzzling to me because (a) what was being done with it all the time I didn't have it? and (b) what kind of genius minds would expect three different teachers to be able to do different things with the same data booklets at the same time? (Hmm, let's not even attempt to answer that question.) One enchanted afternoon during my prep, the technology teacher and I actually almost came to a physical tussle over the stupid sight word booklets:
(Scene: My office. Seventh period. Players: Miss Brave and Mrs. Impatient, the technology teacher.)
Mrs. Impatient: "Hi. I need your word lists."
Miss Brave: "I know, it's just that I'm using them this week, because we're using the same booklet for this round, so I can't test them if I don't have the booklets."
Mrs. Impatient: "Okay, are you using them now?"
Miss Brave: "Yeah, we're doing it this week."
Mrs. Impatient, giving me a 'duh' look and indicating the room around us: "No, I mean...are you using them right now?"
I let her have them, but I practically made her swear an oath in blood that she would return them to me by the next morning, and as I did so I thought: Dear God, what have I become?!
Anyway, I'm getting to the part with the crying! So all week long, Mrs. Impatient and the science teacher (let's call her Mrs. Condescending) have been coming after me (usually at wildly inopportune times like while I'm pushing my easel of doom down the hallway or while I'm -- no lie -- in the middle of teaching a class) to ask me for, say, Edmund's spelling assessment or Dara's word list. I have more than 50 students, so of course I have no idea off the top of my head, so I have to go searching through my giant pile of data, which is wildly disorganized (as you may guess, as a teacher, I hate feeling wildly disorganized), and sometimes I can't find what they're looking for. To be honest, we gave those assessments almost two months ago, and it's been through so many hands since then, that I'm not sure whether it was never administered in the first place, whether I had it and then lost it, whether they had it and lost it, whether the classroom teacher has it instead...you get the picture. And to be further honest, it has yet to be explained to me how this data is going to be used to help us drive our instruction, because our school is like a crazy funhouse where we're constantly being asked to do things without anyone bothering to explain to us why they're necessary, as if administration has some secret master plan that can only be revealed to us a little at a time, so I don't think anyone is exactly feeling doubly motivated to get it done.
Anyway, yesterday Mrs. Condescending launched into one of her helpful suggestions about how this time around I should make sure that all my students are given each section of the assessment and how I should consider making copies of the assessments before I hand them in and...I lost it. I just broke down and teared up in front of my giant pile of paper: "I understand that, but it's just that I have so many students, I cannot make copies of all of this paper, and then it amounts to doing the same work four times, because first I have to grade it on these individual sheets, and then I have to add all the same information to the classroom composite sheet, and now you're telling me to keep another separate grading sheet, and then you and Mrs. Impatient enter all the data, and we're all doing the same work, and some of my students were absent during the spelling test, but it takes a whole period to do the re-test, plus I have to test all my kids again on the word assessment because none of them mastered it the first time, but it's impossible to do that and the spelling assessment when the information is due on Monday and I haven't filled out the composite sheets yet!"
And then, to my surprise, Mrs. Condescending vented right back at me: "Look, I'm a science teacher, I don't even know why I'm doing this, Mrs. Impatient and I are going crazy upstairs trying to enter all the data and track down every piece of missing information, and all the work I have to do has to be done outside of school, and you're not the only one missing information, so don't feel bad, every class has missing information, and I'm just the messenger, I'm just saying that when the data gets entered and the administrators see that there are students missing information..."
You get the picture. Basically, it boils down to everyone at school losing their minds. Where is our literacy coach while this is going on? No one knows! Where are our administrators? They're walking around the school launching surprise observations on a Friday the day after everyone was at school until after 8 pm for parent-teacher conferences! (Which, side note, comes on the heels of the world's most depressing faculty meeting this week; there were three items on the agenda, and it boiled down to (1) The school neighborhood is getting more dangerous, so don't park too far away after dark, (2) We have no more money in the budget for anything, so don't expect any paper and don't get sick because we can't afford subs and (3) Remember how we thought our school would be well-developed on the Quality Review? Well, they changed the Quality Review standards and surprise! We're actually underdeveloped.) I was so fed up that at lunch I went out and spent $22 of my own money to buy color-coded file folders for each class and then stayed late at school creating meticulous checklists to ensure that my data is well-organized and my behind is well-covered in case of mix-ups.
I have already sworn up and down that I am not taking that data out of its folder for anyone. If Joel Klein himself wants to see Alejandro's latest sight word assessment, he can come to my office and comb through the whole beautifully arranged folder. He would probably have to go through Mrs. Impatient and Mrs. Condescending first, though.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
The desire to learn
...is growing among my beginner ELLs. First there was Azul, my Arabic B reader who is desperate to be a C. (In his quest to become a C reader, Azul has taken to drawing a large letter C in the air with his finger and then giving me an exaggerated thumbs up.) Now there is Lukas, my extremely adorable Polish-speaking B reader who is obviously exiting the "silent period" that is typical of beginner ELLs. But Lukas doesn't want to become a C reader. No, Lukas wants to go directly to D!
I was sitting with him today as he did the high-frequency word assessment, and when he finished, I tried to send him on his way so he could move on to the next kid when he surprised me by saying, "Can I read a book?"
This is the most Lukas has ever said to me at one time. "Yes, you can read a book. Where's your book baggie?" I said, pointing toward his reading spot. But Lukas had other ideas. "No, with you?" he said.
Have I mentioned that Lukas is extremely adorable? So yeah, there was no way I could refuse his request. We read Polar Bears together (which, for a B book, has ridiculous vocabulary: "Napping, sliding, waking," I could go on), with me pantomiming the vocabulary to help him figure it out. Then he looked up at me, smiled his extremely adorable smile, and said: "Can I be a D?"
I love that this kid speaks about a dozen words of English, but already he knows that the goal is to move his reading level up. Meanwhile, I would spend all day every day working with Lukas if I could -- he is a pleasant, polite, funny little kid -- but instead I spend all day every day doing assessments.
Sigh.
I was sitting with him today as he did the high-frequency word assessment, and when he finished, I tried to send him on his way so he could move on to the next kid when he surprised me by saying, "Can I read a book?"
This is the most Lukas has ever said to me at one time. "Yes, you can read a book. Where's your book baggie?" I said, pointing toward his reading spot. But Lukas had other ideas. "No, with you?" he said.
Have I mentioned that Lukas is extremely adorable? So yeah, there was no way I could refuse his request. We read Polar Bears together (which, for a B book, has ridiculous vocabulary: "Napping, sliding, waking," I could go on), with me pantomiming the vocabulary to help him figure it out. Then he looked up at me, smiled his extremely adorable smile, and said: "Can I be a D?"
I love that this kid speaks about a dozen words of English, but already he knows that the goal is to move his reading level up. Meanwhile, I would spend all day every day working with Lukas if I could -- he is a pleasant, polite, funny little kid -- but instead I spend all day every day doing assessments.
Sigh.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Confirmed: testing = teaching
As I valiantly finished up my running records this past week (I say "valiantly" because I managed to do it in the face of being off for Veterans' Day and being pulled out of six of my classes this week to proctor a fifth grade exam), I was starting to feel really pumped about the future of my reading groups. I'm losing some kids who have progressed enough that they no longer require intervention services, and I'm gaining others who have stagnated and who will hopefully benefit from being in my group. I had already decided to rearrange my reading partnerships so the kids could work with fresh new partners (I have maybe one partnership that works beautifully, but the rest are sick of each other and need a change -- plus I'm not entirely sure that it's the best idea to pair kids who are on the same reading level, because if both of them happen to be on the planet Jupiter then they're not helping each other move, so I tried to pair kids I thought would work well together even if they might be one level apart). I had even written up goals for myself to organize my small group planning -- my greatest ambition is to plan more strategy lessons based on the kids' running records rather than on our monthly teaching points checklist, since that's really what showcases their deficiencies and what they need to work on.
So I stayed at school until after dark two days this week, planning and organizing my strategy lessons and guided reading groups until I was sure everything would run like clockwork. I pored over those running records and really got down to the nitty-gritty of the weaknesses we needed to tackle -- I even felt like a bit of a rogue, planning strategy lessons that included Fundations work, but I was all, "The only thing holding these kids back is that they're miscuing all the words that include vowel teams and blends, so let's do it!" I felt really energized by the latest round of running records and ready to get down to business tackling my students' weak areas one by one to help them move to the next reading level. Third grade, here they come!
Or so I thought. Because you know what happens when you get really energized by planning, don't you? Your administration comes along and !@#$s with you, that's what happens. And so, for the first time in recorded history, I enthusiastically swore out loud at school (in the privacy of my office, when no children were present, of course). Because on Friday, just as I was wrapping up another full hour of planning and organizing my small groups for next week, a colleague dropped THE BOMB.
"You heard we're starting assessments again on Monday, right?"
My brain went like this: ASSESSMENTS -- MONDAY -- NO ONE TOLD -- I NEVER HEARD -- I JUST PLANNED -- WTF?!?!
Yeah, so, the memo was addressed to "classroom and AIS teachers," but did the AIS teachers actually get this memo? No. (OK, it's not like the classroom teachers knew about it and never told us -- they didn't get the memo until Friday morning either.) Meanwhile, the memo is all, "Kindly do this Monday and turn in your results by 11/24," despite the fact that no one bothered to let us know in advance. Meanwhile part two, there are certain parts of the assessment we don't have to administer if our students already demonstrated "mastery," only I don't know who did and who didn't because they took all my data to input it and never gave it back to me. And the data comes in booklets that are supposed to be re-used with each student so I can't assess anyone because I don't have those booklets. And everyone at my school passes the buck, because it's all about who you take your orders from and who issued the rule, so when I timidly went to check with my administrator, she said she would refer my question to the literacy coach, who never got back to me because she never gets back to anyone and then blames it on TC. Meanwhile part three, the memo (because the memo is gospel, and we all stood around trying to analyze it like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls) said that the assessment was to be administered "during independent reading time," which makes it sound like we're supposed to conduct a mini lesson, which is -- how do I put this delicately? -- effing ridiculous because that spelling assessment takes, at minimum, one full period to conduct. And oh, woe, do you remember how long I spent grading these things last time? The horror!
I told one of my colleagues that I think our administrators think our time is like those cars and tents in the Harry Potter books that look normal on the outside but magically expand on the inside to fit, like, a palatial suite. Like, a typical week in reading may appear to be five days (with interruptions for announcements, crying children, bleeding children, fighting children, field trips, days off, fire drills and being pulled out of the classroom to cover other classes, proctor exams, and go to professional development, and other various emergencies) and 50 minutes each, but actually we should be able to get thirty weeks' worth of work during this time! My colleague told me that as long as all these interruptions were documented, then administration would understand why it looked like I hadn't actually taught anything in weeks. And I was like, "But aside from that, I care that I'm not getting to teach, no one is actually working with my students during this time and they're not learning anything, but they're still being expected to magically progress in reading," and she told me that unfortunately, I would learn to live with that feeling (it was a very "I used to be you" moment reminiscent of old Mafia movies), which stinks, because -- what am I doing here? All I want to do is teach my students. It would be a bonus if I got to teach my students using a tiny bit of my own professional judgement. Is that too much to ask?
Meanwhile, part four, poor Azul has taken to hanging around the desk where I am conferencing with other students, wearing his best puppy dog face, clutching his B books and saying, "When you teach me? I want be C!" Hmm, does anyone know how to say, "I'm sorry, Azul, but I can't work with you individually to give you the help that you need in English and in reading because my bosses at this school just told me I need to listen to your classmates read long lists of high-frequency words for the second time in two months even though it's highly unlikely that their skills have improved in that time because I haven't gotten the chance to actually teach them anything" in Arabic?
So I stayed at school until after dark two days this week, planning and organizing my strategy lessons and guided reading groups until I was sure everything would run like clockwork. I pored over those running records and really got down to the nitty-gritty of the weaknesses we needed to tackle -- I even felt like a bit of a rogue, planning strategy lessons that included Fundations work, but I was all, "The only thing holding these kids back is that they're miscuing all the words that include vowel teams and blends, so let's do it!" I felt really energized by the latest round of running records and ready to get down to business tackling my students' weak areas one by one to help them move to the next reading level. Third grade, here they come!
Or so I thought. Because you know what happens when you get really energized by planning, don't you? Your administration comes along and !@#$s with you, that's what happens. And so, for the first time in recorded history, I enthusiastically swore out loud at school (in the privacy of my office, when no children were present, of course). Because on Friday, just as I was wrapping up another full hour of planning and organizing my small groups for next week, a colleague dropped THE BOMB.
"You heard we're starting assessments again on Monday, right?"
My brain went like this: ASSESSMENTS -- MONDAY -- NO ONE TOLD -- I NEVER HEARD -- I JUST PLANNED -- WTF?!?!
Yeah, so, the memo was addressed to "classroom and AIS teachers," but did the AIS teachers actually get this memo? No. (OK, it's not like the classroom teachers knew about it and never told us -- they didn't get the memo until Friday morning either.) Meanwhile, the memo is all, "Kindly do this Monday and turn in your results by 11/24," despite the fact that no one bothered to let us know in advance. Meanwhile part two, there are certain parts of the assessment we don't have to administer if our students already demonstrated "mastery," only I don't know who did and who didn't because they took all my data to input it and never gave it back to me. And the data comes in booklets that are supposed to be re-used with each student so I can't assess anyone because I don't have those booklets. And everyone at my school passes the buck, because it's all about who you take your orders from and who issued the rule, so when I timidly went to check with my administrator, she said she would refer my question to the literacy coach, who never got back to me because she never gets back to anyone and then blames it on TC. Meanwhile part three, the memo (because the memo is gospel, and we all stood around trying to analyze it like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls) said that the assessment was to be administered "during independent reading time," which makes it sound like we're supposed to conduct a mini lesson, which is -- how do I put this delicately? -- effing ridiculous because that spelling assessment takes, at minimum, one full period to conduct. And oh, woe, do you remember how long I spent grading these things last time? The horror!
I told one of my colleagues that I think our administrators think our time is like those cars and tents in the Harry Potter books that look normal on the outside but magically expand on the inside to fit, like, a palatial suite. Like, a typical week in reading may appear to be five days (with interruptions for announcements, crying children, bleeding children, fighting children, field trips, days off, fire drills and being pulled out of the classroom to cover other classes, proctor exams, and go to professional development, and other various emergencies) and 50 minutes each, but actually we should be able to get thirty weeks' worth of work during this time! My colleague told me that as long as all these interruptions were documented, then administration would understand why it looked like I hadn't actually taught anything in weeks. And I was like, "But aside from that, I care that I'm not getting to teach, no one is actually working with my students during this time and they're not learning anything, but they're still being expected to magically progress in reading," and she told me that unfortunately, I would learn to live with that feeling (it was a very "I used to be you" moment reminiscent of old Mafia movies), which stinks, because -- what am I doing here? All I want to do is teach my students. It would be a bonus if I got to teach my students using a tiny bit of my own professional judgement. Is that too much to ask?
Meanwhile, part four, poor Azul has taken to hanging around the desk where I am conferencing with other students, wearing his best puppy dog face, clutching his B books and saying, "When you teach me? I want be C!" Hmm, does anyone know how to say, "I'm sorry, Azul, but I can't work with you individually to give you the help that you need in English and in reading because my bosses at this school just told me I need to listen to your classmates read long lists of high-frequency words for the second time in two months even though it's highly unlikely that their skills have improved in that time because I haven't gotten the chance to actually teach them anything" in Arabic?
Monday, November 10, 2008
Easy as ABC
Azul is desperate to be a C reader. He's an Arabic speaker who arrived in our school (and the U.S.) late last year. He is adorable and obviously bright; the only thing holding him back in school is the fact that, well, he doesn't speak English (although he's learning!).
So he's reading on a level B, but he is anxious to be a C. So anxious, in fact, that he checks in with me about it every time he encouters me. See, I've been doing running records this past week, and sadly, Azul is not ready to read C books. He's got a good number of sight words, and his comprehension is pretty good ("Why do you think Mom painted all those things?" I asked him, and he responded brightly, "Because it's Halloween!"), but he needs to work on his decoding and his vocabulary. When I broke the news to him -- that he would be staying a B reader -- he gave me the most exaggerated lower lip I've ever seen on a child (and that's saying a lot). As consolation, I told him he could put one C book in his book baggie.
Now, every time he sees me, he asks me whether he can be a C reader. I'll pass his class in the hallway on their way to lunch, and he'll call out, "Hi Miss Brave! Today me C? Now I C?" And I can't help it: he cracks me up. Now that he knows I find him irresistible (he knows how cute he is), I think he does it on purpose to make me laugh. "No C today. Still B," he'll say sadly to his teacher as he returns to the line.
It's nice to have such a motivated student in my group. I'm looking forward to our guided reading group -- at level C, of course!
So he's reading on a level B, but he is anxious to be a C. So anxious, in fact, that he checks in with me about it every time he encouters me. See, I've been doing running records this past week, and sadly, Azul is not ready to read C books. He's got a good number of sight words, and his comprehension is pretty good ("Why do you think Mom painted all those things?" I asked him, and he responded brightly, "Because it's Halloween!"), but he needs to work on his decoding and his vocabulary. When I broke the news to him -- that he would be staying a B reader -- he gave me the most exaggerated lower lip I've ever seen on a child (and that's saying a lot). As consolation, I told him he could put one C book in his book baggie.
Now, every time he sees me, he asks me whether he can be a C reader. I'll pass his class in the hallway on their way to lunch, and he'll call out, "Hi Miss Brave! Today me C? Now I C?" And I can't help it: he cracks me up. Now that he knows I find him irresistible (he knows how cute he is), I think he does it on purpose to make me laugh. "No C today. Still B," he'll say sadly to his teacher as he returns to the line.
It's nice to have such a motivated student in my group. I'm looking forward to our guided reading group -- at level C, of course!
Monday, October 27, 2008
Monday Monday
Feeling fed up on a Monday is never a good sign for the rest of the week.
My frustration has been growing lately because I feel like I spend more time doing paperwork than actually teaching. When I meet with my students for a mini lesson, I have to fill out a checklist where I note whether they have "mastered, attempted or not attempted" the strategy I am teaching that day. When I meet with my students for guided reading, I have to fill out a checklist where I note whether they have "mastered, attempted or not attempted" a list of about 15 behaviors. I also have to fill out a sheet where I write down what I observed, what I coached them on, what focus question I asked them before they read and what teaching point I left them with after they read. When I meet with my students for strategy lessons, I have to fill out a label where I write down what I taught them and what I observed. This is besides all the data from our assessments and running records, which we're starting to do again next week.
I absolutely understand that keeping data is a necessary part of teaching, but it's really hard to fill out all these checklists and labels and teach at the same time. If I'm meeting with four kids in a strategy lesson, and I'm trying to write down everything that's going on, some of my attention is being taken away from those students.
My frustration is also coming from the fact that I don't actually decide what I'm going to teach my students. All of the teachers on my grade got together and planned our teaching points based on the Teachers College curriculum. Some days, as I'm teaching, in my head I'm thinking, "I hate this teaching point and I find it completely irrelevant to my students' actual needs." We're trying to get permission to use teaching points from other grades -- for instance, I'm teaching second graders, but all of them are reading at a first grade level, so doesn't it make sense for me to use the first grade teaching points? That's not dumbing it down; it's just tailoring the curriculum to their actual reading levels. For example, next month's unit is all about characters, and one of our teaching points is something about noticing when the characters in our books "go on internal journeys." Like, am I really going to teach these kids who are reading C level books (sample text: "I kick the ball. I pass the ball") about their characters going on internal journeys? How on earth are they going to apply those strategies to their own texts?
But anyway, for right now I'm using these ridiculously high-level teaching points. And then if my kids don't master the skill -- which they don't because some of the skills I'm teaching them are totally irrelevant to their particular needs -- I have to base my strategy lessons off the checklist I completed for my mini lessons. Which means I'm spending all this time trying to make sure they master the skill of, say, "capturing their ideas on a post-it," when what they really need is, like, "how to get our mouths ready to say the first sound in the word." Grrrr.
Meanwhile, while all this is going on I keep getting pulled from my classes to do coverages of other classes, so my actual class time is becoming all fragmented and choppy and I can't keep track of what I'm teaching when or what I'm teaching to whom. Next week we're starting running records again, which is nerve-racking because (a) it's taking away more instructional time, (b) TC just gave us all new running records, which means I killed 8,000 trees making copies of the old running records that I can no longer use, and (c) I have a sinking suspicion that most of my kids aren't ready to move up, and my administration always gives the whole grade a list of which teacher's students made gains and whose didn't. Glargh.
My frustration has been growing lately because I feel like I spend more time doing paperwork than actually teaching. When I meet with my students for a mini lesson, I have to fill out a checklist where I note whether they have "mastered, attempted or not attempted" the strategy I am teaching that day. When I meet with my students for guided reading, I have to fill out a checklist where I note whether they have "mastered, attempted or not attempted" a list of about 15 behaviors. I also have to fill out a sheet where I write down what I observed, what I coached them on, what focus question I asked them before they read and what teaching point I left them with after they read. When I meet with my students for strategy lessons, I have to fill out a label where I write down what I taught them and what I observed. This is besides all the data from our assessments and running records, which we're starting to do again next week.
I absolutely understand that keeping data is a necessary part of teaching, but it's really hard to fill out all these checklists and labels and teach at the same time. If I'm meeting with four kids in a strategy lesson, and I'm trying to write down everything that's going on, some of my attention is being taken away from those students.
My frustration is also coming from the fact that I don't actually decide what I'm going to teach my students. All of the teachers on my grade got together and planned our teaching points based on the Teachers College curriculum. Some days, as I'm teaching, in my head I'm thinking, "I hate this teaching point and I find it completely irrelevant to my students' actual needs." We're trying to get permission to use teaching points from other grades -- for instance, I'm teaching second graders, but all of them are reading at a first grade level, so doesn't it make sense for me to use the first grade teaching points? That's not dumbing it down; it's just tailoring the curriculum to their actual reading levels. For example, next month's unit is all about characters, and one of our teaching points is something about noticing when the characters in our books "go on internal journeys." Like, am I really going to teach these kids who are reading C level books (sample text: "I kick the ball. I pass the ball") about their characters going on internal journeys? How on earth are they going to apply those strategies to their own texts?
But anyway, for right now I'm using these ridiculously high-level teaching points. And then if my kids don't master the skill -- which they don't because some of the skills I'm teaching them are totally irrelevant to their particular needs -- I have to base my strategy lessons off the checklist I completed for my mini lessons. Which means I'm spending all this time trying to make sure they master the skill of, say, "capturing their ideas on a post-it," when what they really need is, like, "how to get our mouths ready to say the first sound in the word." Grrrr.
Meanwhile, while all this is going on I keep getting pulled from my classes to do coverages of other classes, so my actual class time is becoming all fragmented and choppy and I can't keep track of what I'm teaching when or what I'm teaching to whom. Next week we're starting running records again, which is nerve-racking because (a) it's taking away more instructional time, (b) TC just gave us all new running records, which means I killed 8,000 trees making copies of the old running records that I can no longer use, and (c) I have a sinking suspicion that most of my kids aren't ready to move up, and my administration always gives the whole grade a list of which teacher's students made gains and whose didn't. Glargh.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Does testing equal teaching?
It's been a while! This is mostly because I spent all week grading my students' TC assessments. One month ago, they took these new Teachers College spelling assessments. We were told we would eventually get together as a grade and go over the procedure for grading them (it's not as simple as "correct" or "incorrect"; they actually get points for various word features like initial consonants and short vowel sounds).
The giant pile of assessments sat on my desk for a month, until Thursday, when we had our meeting where we learned how to grade them and were informed that our administration would like us to finish grading them by Monday so they can be plugged into the computer. Excuse me? We sat on this for a month and then we're given three days (two of which, I might add, are weekend days) to get it done? Most of the teachers I work with had fewer than 12 to grade; I have 51 students. Two lists of 25 words each equals 102 spelling tests on which I had to analyze every word and then add up the number of "feature points" per word. Plus, the grading grid is naturally microscopic, as to fit all the information in, so I was hunched over my desk all day yesterday trying to fit the numbers in my tiniest handwriting. Not to mention the fact that my students cannot spell, so I had a lot of deciphering to do to make sure they were still getting credit for all the "word features" they did include.
Allegedly, all this data is going into a computer that will spit out oodles of fascinating information about exactly what my students need to work on (I can tell you right now: most of them have their consonants down cold, but those long vowel patterns like the o-e in hope and the i-e in shine? Ouch), but what's killing me is that November is a week away and we'll be starting running records and this assessment again. Are we really going to see enough of a seismic shift in a month's time that it's worth taking away our instructional time to administer this blasted thing again, not to mention our personal sanity to grade it? I mean, we haven't even looked at the data yet, let alone made any attempt to use the data in order to drive our instruction, so it's highly unlikely that we'll see any growth...so why are we wasting our time?
Part of the assessment is sitting with one kid at a time while he or she reads eight lists of high-frequency sight words. It's easy to do -- they (hopefully) just shoot down the list, all "the a and he she it they will" without stopping to take a breath -- but it takes forever, and meanwhile no one's getting a guided reading group or a strategy lesson or an individual conference that day because I'm checking off sight words. I'm thinking it'll take at least two weeks to finish all my running records and these assessments, especially in the midst of all the other stuff that goes on that precludes reading, so that's two weeks where I'm not actually, you know, teaching reading, and then our administration wonders why our kids aren't improving, like they're supposed to learn these reading strategies by osmosis or something...unless they think that testing actually equals teaching?
The giant pile of assessments sat on my desk for a month, until Thursday, when we had our meeting where we learned how to grade them and were informed that our administration would like us to finish grading them by Monday so they can be plugged into the computer. Excuse me? We sat on this for a month and then we're given three days (two of which, I might add, are weekend days) to get it done? Most of the teachers I work with had fewer than 12 to grade; I have 51 students. Two lists of 25 words each equals 102 spelling tests on which I had to analyze every word and then add up the number of "feature points" per word. Plus, the grading grid is naturally microscopic, as to fit all the information in, so I was hunched over my desk all day yesterday trying to fit the numbers in my tiniest handwriting. Not to mention the fact that my students cannot spell, so I had a lot of deciphering to do to make sure they were still getting credit for all the "word features" they did include.
Allegedly, all this data is going into a computer that will spit out oodles of fascinating information about exactly what my students need to work on (I can tell you right now: most of them have their consonants down cold, but those long vowel patterns like the o-e in hope and the i-e in shine? Ouch), but what's killing me is that November is a week away and we'll be starting running records and this assessment again. Are we really going to see enough of a seismic shift in a month's time that it's worth taking away our instructional time to administer this blasted thing again, not to mention our personal sanity to grade it? I mean, we haven't even looked at the data yet, let alone made any attempt to use the data in order to drive our instruction, so it's highly unlikely that we'll see any growth...so why are we wasting our time?
Part of the assessment is sitting with one kid at a time while he or she reads eight lists of high-frequency sight words. It's easy to do -- they (hopefully) just shoot down the list, all "the a and he she it they will" without stopping to take a breath -- but it takes forever, and meanwhile no one's getting a guided reading group or a strategy lesson or an individual conference that day because I'm checking off sight words. I'm thinking it'll take at least two weeks to finish all my running records and these assessments, especially in the midst of all the other stuff that goes on that precludes reading, so that's two weeks where I'm not actually, you know, teaching reading, and then our administration wonders why our kids aren't improving, like they're supposed to learn these reading strategies by osmosis or something...unless they think that testing actually equals teaching?
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
School is starting to heat up
How ironic that after I wrote about running records, running record disaster struck! Our friends at Teachers College decided that now, when most of us are 95% finished with our running records (meaning that our students are almost all leveled and grouped), would be a good time to inform us that the books we use to do our running records (they are called Bebop books; I have no idea why) are actually leveled wrong themselves.
One of the I books is actually a J. One of the J books is actually a K. One of the K books is actually a P (are you kidding me?!). You can't make this stuff up. Anyway, we got this memo from our literacy coach today that included that dreaded word: Retest. Argh! Today I stayed after school (for the first time, so I absolutely cannot complain) to get myself organized. With all the data I'm trying to collect and manage, I think my 5 classes this year might be harder to keep track of than my 19 classes last year.
Other minor annoyances: I had my schedule all beautifully color-coded and now of course it's changed, so I had to use white-out and now it's ugly; the suspension room schedule was released and my name is indeed on it; and they keep adding kids to my 50 minutes roster without telling me and without providing me with the headphones the kids need to use the computers they're supposing to be using during 50 minutes.
And, it's only Tuesday. But if there's one thing I've learned from last year, it's this: I can handle it!
One of the I books is actually a J. One of the J books is actually a K. One of the K books is actually a P (are you kidding me?!). You can't make this stuff up. Anyway, we got this memo from our literacy coach today that included that dreaded word: Retest. Argh! Today I stayed after school (for the first time, so I absolutely cannot complain) to get myself organized. With all the data I'm trying to collect and manage, I think my 5 classes this year might be harder to keep track of than my 19 classes last year.
Other minor annoyances: I had my schedule all beautifully color-coded and now of course it's changed, so I had to use white-out and now it's ugly; the suspension room schedule was released and my name is indeed on it; and they keep adding kids to my 50 minutes roster without telling me and without providing me with the headphones the kids need to use the computers they're supposing to be using during 50 minutes.
And, it's only Tuesday. But if there's one thing I've learned from last year, it's this: I can handle it!
Friday, September 12, 2008
Alphabet of woe
The other day I saw one of my (mildly annoying) students from last year. "Miss Brave," she said with interest, "are you a teacher now?"
"Am I a teacher now?" I repeated, slightly put out. "I was a teacher last year, too, my friend!"
"No, not a writing teacher," she replied with exasperation, "like a teacher teacher."
"I'm a reading teacher this year," I said.
"Oh," she responded, "so you turned into a reading teacher?"
Poof! Like magic, I've turned into a reading teacher! And I really enjoy it, too. Even though all I've done so far is running records (if I have to hear one more kid butcher his way through Fancy Dance -- in which the lines "They wear beadwork and bells. They wear feathers and fringe" frequently get mangled into "They were badwork and bells. They wear fathers and fingers" -- I might scream), I think I'm getting into the groove and gearing up for what's ahead. So far, that entails writing everything down in multiple places (I swear I am going to start dreaming of lists of kids' names that have letters of the alphabet -- representing their reading levels -- next to them) and color coding everything. I'm fully prepared for the fact that my administration is going to count all the labels in my binder to make sure I'm seeing my students enough times a week and that they're going to grill me when my kids don't move up on their running records.
Today we had an Academic Intervention Services meeting in which we discussed how many kids each of us could expect to have in our groups. I thought AIS groups were supposed to have no more than ten, hence the phrase "small group instruction," but it turns out we can go up to 15. Theoretically, we are supposed to be servicing the kids who are below grade level, but in some classes this can be up to three-quarters of the kids in the class. In one of my classes, 16 of the 22 kids are below grade level. So I asked, am I supposed to take 15 kids and leave 7 with the classroom teacher? We all agreed that this did not make sense.
Just to give those of you out there who are not reading teachers an idea of how this works: In reading, kids are assigned reading levels that correspond to a letter of the alphabet. Theoretically, kids should come into first grade at a level C and leave at a level I. (If you think that sounds like a big jump, you're right -- first grade is widely considered the most crucial year for reading progress. I've heard it said that if kids aren't reading on grade level by the time they leave first grade, they'll never catch up to grade level.) In second grade, they should enter at a level I and leave at a level M. The kids I will service in AIS range from A to H.
In order to find out what a kid's level is, you do something called a "running record." When you do a running record, a kid reads a book out loud to you while you sit there with a teacher's copy of the same text and record all his or her mistakes (or "miscues," as the running record calls them). (My favorite miscue so far has been "mother" for "mouth," so that a sentence about someone trying to whistle became "She puts two fingers in her mother and blows.") A handy little chart at the bottom of the running record converts the number of miscues to the percentage of words the child read correctly. Then you ask them some comprehension questions. In order to achieve a certain level, the child has to read with 96% or above accuracy and answer three out of four comprehension questions correctly.
We do running records five times a year, in September, November, January, March and May. Unfortunately, right now a lot of our kids are experiencing what we call "summer slump" or "summer slide," in which they don't read over the summer and forget how. I've had a lot of kids take dramatic tumbles from H all the way back down to E. On the one hand, this is disappointing, but on the other hand it probably means that they'll jump right back up pretty quickly (I hope).
The other day, a sweet boy for whom English is obviously not a first language said to me, "Miss Brave, when are you going to use me?"
Trying not to laugh, I asked, "What do you mean?"
"I've already read all these H books from Ms. C's class," he said, indicating his book baggie, "and I am ready to be an I!"
Awwww! Let's hope so!
"Am I a teacher now?" I repeated, slightly put out. "I was a teacher last year, too, my friend!"
"No, not a writing teacher," she replied with exasperation, "like a teacher teacher."
"I'm a reading teacher this year," I said.
"Oh," she responded, "so you turned into a reading teacher?"
Poof! Like magic, I've turned into a reading teacher! And I really enjoy it, too. Even though all I've done so far is running records (if I have to hear one more kid butcher his way through Fancy Dance -- in which the lines "They wear beadwork and bells. They wear feathers and fringe" frequently get mangled into "They were badwork and bells. They wear fathers and fingers" -- I might scream), I think I'm getting into the groove and gearing up for what's ahead. So far, that entails writing everything down in multiple places (I swear I am going to start dreaming of lists of kids' names that have letters of the alphabet -- representing their reading levels -- next to them) and color coding everything. I'm fully prepared for the fact that my administration is going to count all the labels in my binder to make sure I'm seeing my students enough times a week and that they're going to grill me when my kids don't move up on their running records.
Today we had an Academic Intervention Services meeting in which we discussed how many kids each of us could expect to have in our groups. I thought AIS groups were supposed to have no more than ten, hence the phrase "small group instruction," but it turns out we can go up to 15. Theoretically, we are supposed to be servicing the kids who are below grade level, but in some classes this can be up to three-quarters of the kids in the class. In one of my classes, 16 of the 22 kids are below grade level. So I asked, am I supposed to take 15 kids and leave 7 with the classroom teacher? We all agreed that this did not make sense.
Just to give those of you out there who are not reading teachers an idea of how this works: In reading, kids are assigned reading levels that correspond to a letter of the alphabet. Theoretically, kids should come into first grade at a level C and leave at a level I. (If you think that sounds like a big jump, you're right -- first grade is widely considered the most crucial year for reading progress. I've heard it said that if kids aren't reading on grade level by the time they leave first grade, they'll never catch up to grade level.) In second grade, they should enter at a level I and leave at a level M. The kids I will service in AIS range from A to H.
In order to find out what a kid's level is, you do something called a "running record." When you do a running record, a kid reads a book out loud to you while you sit there with a teacher's copy of the same text and record all his or her mistakes (or "miscues," as the running record calls them). (My favorite miscue so far has been "mother" for "mouth," so that a sentence about someone trying to whistle became "She puts two fingers in her mother and blows.") A handy little chart at the bottom of the running record converts the number of miscues to the percentage of words the child read correctly. Then you ask them some comprehension questions. In order to achieve a certain level, the child has to read with 96% or above accuracy and answer three out of four comprehension questions correctly.
We do running records five times a year, in September, November, January, March and May. Unfortunately, right now a lot of our kids are experiencing what we call "summer slump" or "summer slide," in which they don't read over the summer and forget how. I've had a lot of kids take dramatic tumbles from H all the way back down to E. On the one hand, this is disappointing, but on the other hand it probably means that they'll jump right back up pretty quickly (I hope).
The other day, a sweet boy for whom English is obviously not a first language said to me, "Miss Brave, when are you going to use me?"
Trying not to laugh, I asked, "What do you mean?"
"I've already read all these H books from Ms. C's class," he said, indicating his book baggie, "and I am ready to be an I!"
Awwww! Let's hope so!
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