Lead Lit Topic: Assessment
Making sense of the enormous amount of student data in any classroom or school is probably the biggest challenge we face individually and in our school communities. Authentic assessment of learning helps us plan quality instruction. Here you'll find everything from one-page templates of formative assessments created by literacy coaches to videos of staff teams poring over large summative data sets.
Results
Humanizing Data
Data days are a responsibility that often falls to instructional coaches. We spend time analyzing data, soliciting teacher feedback, crafting an agenda, and planning a launching activity. It’s hard to...
Reshaping Data Stories
In the game of data analysis, success is crossing home plate. Grade-level standard is achieved, growth happens, learners progress… and everyone cheers. The thing is, some are starting the game...
Visual Data for Literacy
It was two weeks before our winter data review, and my grade-level PLCs were beginning to prepare for these meetings with a new set of data. Given that our teaching...
A Richer Picture: Assessing Our Students as Readers (And Not Just in Reading)
Independent reading is not merely the ability to decode a text with minimal errors. Nor is it simply the ability to answer correctly the teacher's questions. Independent reading is the...
Using a Filtering Process to Make Data-Driven Intervention Decisions
In response to early literacy screening legislation, as well as a desire to better know all of our students, I advocated for our district to screen all our grade 3-5...
A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Screening Team
To effectively teach our students, we need to know their strengths and areas to grow. Our school, like all schools, gives a suite of assessments at various benchmark intervals during...
A Sense of Accomplishment: Four Strategies for Making Students’ Literacy Learning Visible
One of my first public social activities in 2020 was participating in a summer volunteer project. My city’s local arts school was offering a weekend course to learn how to...
No More Learning Target Drudgery
Making learning targets meaningful to first graders was more complicated than I thought. I know the research and understand why kids need to know what they are learning and why...
How Teacher Evaluation Can Support School-Wide Change
Can we leverage teacher evaluation systems to support school-wide change? For example, if our goal is an effective and engaging ELA curriculum, in what ways might formal observations help implementation?...
Student Moves
Students move in and out of our schools all the time. Families are transient, and their kids go with them—down the street, across town, across the state, across the country....
Home Language Is Love Language
There is the memory, as if it were yesterday: having brunch with a graduate school classmate, seated on an outdoor patio on a gorgeous Sunday morning in late spring. I...
How Am I Doing? One Principal’s Experience with Feedback
In the past, I would ask only for ratings from teachers on my performance. No room for comments. To be honest, I was afraid of character assassination. So for three...
From Observations to Questions
What an honor it is to be invited into a classroom. I’m always reminded that it is a privilege. When teachers invite me to observe an English learner in their...
Beyond a Checklist for Teaching and Leading
If I had a dime for every time I’ve felt like a fraud in the literacy world, I’d be rich. I’d still feel like a fraud, but at least I’d...
Student Files
“I don’t look at student cumulative files,” the teacher said to me. “I want every student to walk into my room with a fresh start.” I stared at her dumbly....
Portfolios for the Coachee
I haven't always liked my note-taking system. It’s always changing, and I'm always moving from one notebook to another. I am continuously searching for different ways to capture my thoughts,...
Environmental Walks: A Snapshot of a Literacy Culture
In spring, I facilitate a number of parent tours of the school. These building tours are for incoming students who are either new to the district because of open enrollment...
I Still Am
When my oldest son was young, he would spend hours rooting through the dirt, inspecting what lived underneath the rocks in our yard and carefully examining every crawling insect he...
Reframing Data Discussions
“Will you lead a meeting going over ELA benchmark data with second through sixth grade on one of the institute days?” “Sure.” (Please no.) “Which day?” (Please say the second...
Analyzing Student Work: Beginning with Strengths
“I don’t even know where to start,” she mutters under her breath as her eyes widen at the sight and her shoulders slump. They lie there, a stack of notes...
Showcasing the Vision
A family portrait hanging on the gallery wall in your house. A photo block of your child’s first birthday front and center on the fireplace mantel. A matted and framed...
