I agree that we need to measure academic progress. I agree that this measurement needs to be standardized. I even agree that students should be tested in order to accomplish these purposes. What I am questioning is the amount of testing. My students take the NWEA three times a year (a test that even I think is a good one and worth the time it takes to administer), WIDA at least once and sometimes twice, the M-Step (the new MEAP), and the NAEP. In the past I've also had to administer a pre-SAT or other college readiness test, career assessments, and a host of pilot tests in preparation for new versions of existing tests. Is it really necessary for my students to take four different standardized tests each year to measure academic progress? Would it be unreasonable to choose one test? The time saved could be rededicated to teaching new content and reinforcing past concepts. Personally, I think increasing time spent on instruction would do much more to increase academic growth and close the achievement gap than testing and retesting.
I generally avoid getting "political" or complaining about the system, but yesterday was a teacher's workday for the end of the semester, and I spent most of it preparing materials and schedules for my students to take not one, not two, but three standardized tests in the month of February. This was very annoying to me because I've already lost four weeks of my year to standardized tests, am going to loose three more in February, and another five in the spring. That's a total of twelve weeks of education lost to testing; considering there are only about 36 weeks of school a year, that's a third of the year spent on testing! On top of educational time lost is the stress in puts on the kids, and in February they are taking these three tests simultaneously!
I agree that we need to measure academic progress. I agree that this measurement needs to be standardized. I even agree that students should be tested in order to accomplish these purposes. What I am questioning is the amount of testing. My students take the NWEA three times a year (a test that even I think is a good one and worth the time it takes to administer), WIDA at least once and sometimes twice, the M-Step (the new MEAP), and the NAEP. In the past I've also had to administer a pre-SAT or other college readiness test, career assessments, and a host of pilot tests in preparation for new versions of existing tests. Is it really necessary for my students to take four different standardized tests each year to measure academic progress? Would it be unreasonable to choose one test? The time saved could be rededicated to teaching new content and reinforcing past concepts. Personally, I think increasing time spent on instruction would do much more to increase academic growth and close the achievement gap than testing and retesting.
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Several years ago I was taking a course towards my masters degree and the professor told us that our grade would be based off of an action research project that we would design and conduct ourselves. After I stopped hyperventilating and the screams of "NO! I can't design and do research!" quieted in my head, I determined that I would not let this beat me (or ruin my 4.0 GPA) and started thinking about what I could do. I'd long been interested in the struggles older ESL students had with learning to read when their first language did not have a Latin-based alphabet. I decided to look into this and try to design a curriculum to assist with this. The curriculum had to be easy to implement, teach vocabulary as well as reading skills, produce a large amount of student growth in a short time, and above all else cheap (as my budget was zero).
The research and various academic details behind what I developed is covered in my paper, Intensive Phonics Instruction, and summarized in this PowerPoint. The bottom line is that my curriculum worked: the previous year students grew an average of 16% in reading on the NWEA, that year they grew an average of 159%!!! I received an A for the course (and still work with the professor on teacher training projects and curriculum development), but thankfully the next year I didn't need have any students who were struggling with reading or vocabulary acquisition, so the curriculum stayed in its boxes and I didn't do much with it. This year my reading intervention class is made up primarily of new arrivals with little to no English language proficiency. Some of these middle school students have been in the country for a year and are still testing at a level 1 on the WIDA. I knew that the materials I had been given would never be appropriate for them, and what they really needed was to learn a lot of English vocabulary as quickly as possible. I decided to revisit my word family based phonics curriculum and focus in on vocabulary instruction more than phonics with it. Thus far things have been going very well. The students have been learning a lot of new words, and my district supervisor is highly impressed at their linguistic progress. Students who wouldn't say a word in English now communicate what they want, when they want (their grammar is far from perfect and it takes a lot of work, but they get the job done). I've also taken the time to add some activities and worksheets to the packet and have others in the works (just waiting on my production manager, aka Dad, to build the pieces). The two main activities added this time around were: 1. Magnet Spelling Cards: the pictures are on strips that we place on metal cookie sheets (from the dollar store) and the students use magnet letters to spell the words. 2. Scrambled words: inspired by a picture I saw on Pinterest, I made an egg carton's worth of words for each section. I numbered plastic eggs and placed Scrabble tiles that spelled one of our words into each egg. (more on this activity in coming post) The activities felt a little elementary to me, and I wondered a bit how my middle school students (especially the 9th graders) would receive them, but they were actually really excited about them and seem to genuinely enjoy doing them. Since we follow the same sequence of activities each week it can get a bit monotonous, but we break it up with book studies as well. I choose a classic picture book that at least remotely relates to the word family (such as Chicken Little for short i) and we spend the week reading the book and working on reading strategies based on whatever book we're reading. The kids enjoy the break and it's a lot of fun introducing them to these classic English children's books. |
AuthorI've been teaching since 2000 and love what I do! Archives
May 2018
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