A LYSer asks
the following:
SC,
I have attended a number of your conference sessions over the past
several years and always feel that your information is very pertinent
and valuable. Our campus will be conducting 3-week common
assessments this year and I am curious about your thoughts on the reflective
process following these assessments.
What are your recommendations on what to include: weak TEKS (Texas
Essential Knowledge and Skills); plans for re-teaching; etc.; to help drive
future instruction and fill gaps from previous teaching?
Thank you for your time and advice.
SC Response
Thank you for
your kind words and great question!
Short-term
data analysis and reflection is a quick process. Think halftime
adjustments in football.
A. What’s
working? Let’s take advantage of that.
B. What’s not
working? What will we do different to slow down the damage?
Most schools
get hung up spending all their time either hating the assessment and/or sorting
students into “can do/can’t do” groups. Both of these actions are
counter-productive.
In terms of immediate
adjustments and actions, what the instructional team should do is identify the
two deepest holes (the SE’s the students as a whole did the worst on) and
re-teach those two elements as they continue to stay on pace with the
curriculum. Those identified deepest hole concepts should be added to the
next checkpoint and then after the students take that checkpoint, the new
deepest holes are identified and the process continues.
Do what
works, quit doing what doesn’t work and re-teach the deepest holes as you
continue teaching forward. That’s it in a nutshell.
For more
direct support, just call.
Think. Work. Achieve.
Your turn...
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