Legendary Lens
"Excellence Without Boundaries"
March 23, 2015
What does it mean to have a Legendary Lens?
As we serve with an unrelenting commitment to excellence, we must posses a shared and common LENS. As two very wise women once said, "One Band. One Sound." makes for LEGENDARY outcomes! The Legendary Lens serves as a weekly calibration which defines our collective target and guides our aim for excellence.
High Leverage Targets
Alignment
Data Driven Instruction
Use of Instructional Time
Quote of the Week
Principal Message
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work!
Thank you for our teamwork this weekend at the Job Fair and Saturday School!
StrengthFinder Interviews
- highlight key words/phrases from the each of the 5 strengths that will help you learn more about your teammate.
- identify what your teammate adds to the team
Click here for team's strengths.
RESUME NEEDED
STAAR Testing Support
Job Fair
Chaperones for Friday Dance
April 14th - Leadership SWAP
2015-2016 CORE PLANNING MEETING
Taylor & IC Meetings
2015-2016 Instructional Coaching Planning Meeting
Marshall Memo
Timothy Shanahan on Real Test Prep
“The idea of having students practice answering test questions is ubiquitous and ineffective in raising test scores,” says Timothy Shanahan (University of Illinois/ Chicago) in this article in The Reading Teacher. He understands the pressure to raise scores on the new generation of more-challenging ELA tests coming down the pike – PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and others. But the time-honored approach of analyzing sample test items and having students answer questions on main idea, supporting detail, providing evidence, describing a character, identifying a theme, and drawing conclusions doesn’t work, he says. “It has never worked. And it won’t work any better with the new assessments on the horizon. It’s as ineffective as pushing the elevator button multiple times to hurry it along or turning the thermostat to 90º to make a room warm up faster.”
So why are so many principals and superintendents and teachers wasting valuable instructional time on an ineffective strategy? “There is a kind of logic to it,” says Shanahan: “The students are practicing something that at least looks like it could improve test scores.” But the fundamental problem is that many educators are not sure what will improve test scores and make students better readers. It’s not students’ ability to answer questions on specific skills, says Shanahan – “performance on various question types explains none of the variance in student performance on standardized comprehension tests… Analyses of test performance suggest that outcome variance is due not to the questions but to the passages. On reading comprehension tests, it matters how well students read the passages that they will be questioned about. If you want higher test scores, then teach your students to read the test passages better.” How do teachers do that? Here are Shanahan’s suggestions:
• Teach students how to figure out unknown words. When they take the new tests, students are going to encounter some words they don’t know – there’s no way they will have learned all the possible words. If instruction during the year has focused on learning as many words as possible, students will be up the creek without a paddle. But if instruction has focused on learning words and strategies for figuring out unknown words, students will be able to manage. Shanahan believes that during the year, too many teachers are pre-teaching words. That’s okay if the words’ meaning can’t be figured out from context clues. But if there are context clues, as there usually are, students should be required to do the work of figuring out the word – and explicitly taught how to struggle successfully.
• Making sense of sentences. Consider this sentence from a fourth-grade text and how difficult it would be for many students to decipher its dependent clauses:
The women of Montgomery, both young and older, would come in with their fancy holiday dresses that needed adjustments or their Sunday suits or blouses that needed just a touch – a flower or some velvet trimming or something to make the ladies look festive.
Students need explicit instruction in how to close-read this sentence, break it down to its basic elements by taking out parenthetical phrases, and make sense of it. The same is true of sentences that use the passive voice (It was determined by Roosevelt that the Chancellor’s message did not require an immediate response from the State Department). “There is a substantial research base showing the effectiveness of sentence combining and sentence reduction in improving students’ writing and reading comprehension,” says Shanahan. “Such lessons, at one time, were commonplace in many American classrooms. Perhaps it’s time for their rediscovery.”
• Silent reading with real understanding – Reading comprehension tests require students to read lengthy passages without prompting or assistance. How much practice are students getting at this demanding task? Shanahan wonders. He sees silent reading periods in schools he visits, but he’s unclear: “I just can’t tell, from what I see, whether the students are really improving in that essential reading skill or whether they are languishing. In many situations, I doubt whether the teacher knows, either. Sadly, I’m finding that few teachers have any idea how to teach students to engage successfully in this kind of extended silent reading.” Shanahan believes many students need to be asked to read one sentence silently and be quizzed on it, then two sentences, then a paragraph, then a page, then a chapter. “This kind of build-up reading with intensive questioning can take place beyond the reading book,” he says – in science, social studies, Weekly Reader, Time for Kids. And students need to be able to do it without picture clues.
If we teach these three things well – figuring out unknown words, breaking down difficult sentences, and sustaining concentration and comprehension when reading long passages silently – Shanahan believes we will see improved test performance, and students will be better readers as well.
“Let’s Get Higher Scores on These New Assessments” by Timothy Shanahan in The Reading Teacher, March 2015 (Vol. 68, #6, p. 459-463), available for purchase at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trtr.1329/pdf; Shanahan can be reached at shanahan@uic.edu.
Leadership Weekly Meeting Agendas
Leadership Presence
Core Team - Mondays 4:30 pm to 6:30 pm
Trailblazers - 2:45 pm to 4:00 pm
Core Team
Read thoroughly, have requested items, and identify what you will be facilitating. Let me know if you have any questions.
Instructional Focus in a Nutshell
Trailblazer Team
Read thoroughly, have requested items, and identify what you will be facilitating. Let me know if you have any questions.