Lovett Notes
A Newsletter for Lovett Staff
Coming up this week!
Monday February 25
Da Camera Visits 1st
3:15 pm SWPD Meeting; Data Room
Tuesday February 26
5th Grade Math & 4th Grade Writing Test
9:00 am Da Camera Visits TREK
6:00 pm Screenagers
Wednesday February 27
4th Grade Takes NAEP
Da Camera Visits 1st
8:00 am Spring Pictures
Thursday February 28
5th Grade Reading test
9:00 am 3rd Grade Field Trip to Museum of Fine Arts
Saturday March 2
Solo Ensemble Contest at Parker Elementary
Assessment is the bar for learning
Like it or not we live in a world of assessments. We must provide day to day experiences for our students that prepare them for the assessment and the level of thinking and type of questions they will face. Imagine a student preparing to take the Bar exam, taking a class to prepare them. Then they find out that the materials and experiences in the class was not similar or at the same level of thinking as required on the Bar....YIKES!!!! I don't know about you, but I would be one unhappy student.
As I start scheduling time to talk with teachers about student performance, I would want you to be able to share with me how your day to day experiences, teaching and student work, prepare students for the rigors of assessments.Below are a few things to pay attention to, whether you are preparing students for a standardized assessment, district assessment or teacher created assessment:
- Know the assessment! If you don't know the assessment you can't effectively prepare your students. For standardized measures, we have released test. For classroom assessment, you make the test..so there is no reason that your students wouldn't be prepared to excel.
- Teach with the END in mind! Yep, I know, you've heard it a million or billion times. It works and leads to the most effective development of objective and lessons.
- Do not shy away from providing your students with the level of challenge they will face on an assessment.
- Have a way(system) to analyze what they know and don't know based on how they perform on the assessment......and then use this information to plan your reteach or intervention.
How do you know? ACTING on your DATA
Do you choose to act...on your data? If you want to enhance learning, you must choose to act on the data. After assessing students, whether it be using common assessment, DRA, weekly assessment or practice STAAR assessments, you must ANALYZE that data to determine what it is telling you about your students learning. After analysis, you must then CHOOSE TO ACT on what the data is telling you. Below is a checklist of effective practices that are important when you analyze your data and use your data to enhance learning:
1. You must first ANALYZE your data. If you miss this step your plans may have some impact on student learning, but it will not have optimal impact on learning. This should be done first individually and it is enhanced when you are also able to analyze in groups. Do NO SKIP THIS STEP
1a. When you analyze, you can not do this well without the actual assessment in front of you. You want to analyze the questions, see how your students answered and look at the question stems. How were the questions asked? What vocabulary was used? Were distractors used? This helps you to identify their misunderstandings and formulate a strategy for addressing.
2. Develop a STRATEGY: once you have completed real analysis of your data, you are on to developing a strategy. If you are just continuing with the same as you did last year, you won't see different results. "Plan with a purpose and not for the sake of just planning itself"
3. IMPLEMENTATION: Be specific about when you will implement. Outline this on a calendar with data and times. When you miss this step, you risk weeks and weeks going by and your great strategy never reaches your students
4. LESSON PLAN: The lesson plan is what most like to jump to. However if you are building a lesson without analyzing, without the right strategy and without an implementation timeline and plan, you are just planning for the sake of planning.
The above is a simplified list of effective practices to being data driven. I recommend looking at each practice and really reflecting on if you do this step and if so how well.