How I Track Writing Data

This is the follow up to my post about RTI data in ELAR.  If you missed it, catch up here. 

I am a big believer in evaluating and re-evaluating how we do things often. I especially like to look at things in relation to time, most likely because I always feel like there isn’t enough of it!

I have tried a lot of different ways of tracking what my students know and don’t know.  I have tried tracking it myself in charts, graphs, spreadsheets, checklists, etc.  I have tried getting the students to track it on their own, which sounds good but is a colossal time-sucker that ends up with me going around saying, “Write this down! Stop that! No! Not like that!” None of these ways seemed to work for me.  If they do for you, I’m super happy.  I’m in no way ever going to say how I do anything in this world is the only way or even the best.  

Here is the way I keep up with it.  Warning!  This is messy.  It’s ugly…..and it’s going to break some of your pretty-fonts-and-graphics hearts.  

The Basics—

1. 1. I keep a clipboard with a legal pad for each class in a box on my group table.  I label each clipboard with the homeroom name.  I realize I could print multiple copies, but I avoid the copier like the plague.  I’m also that person who doesn’t realize until it’s too late that I need more and end up handwriting anyway.  
   2. On average, I use one or two pages per homeroom each week. 
   3. Since I use the class numbering system, I don’t write names.  I write the class numbers down the side.  If I want to go back and look at a student’s record over time, I just flip the pages back and look for that line. 
   4. I don’t only record skill mastery for RTI on this page.  I also record weekly writing conference notes by each student’s number.  This has been a great time-saver for me because I’m not going back and forth between two different records.  Another plus is that it keeps my focus on WRITING, not individual skills.  I do believe the skill work is important.  I just don’t believe it should be my only focus.  Keeping writing workshop notes together with the skills reminds me every day of my main job…building better writers. 
   5. I don’t record skill mastery every week, only when I feel like it is time to do a mastery check.  I use my expiration dates to decide this.  On the weeks that I do record a skill check, I use one of those little post-it notes to bookmark that page, writing the skill on the post-it.  That way, if I need to quickly relocate that record, I can. 
   6. I write the date at the top of each page. I usually write, “Week of August 21st,”using the first date of the week.   I didn’t in the example because it is only an example……and I forgot.  🙂 

 

To show you what my records look like, I pulled examples from my clipboards from the previous year, but I mixed up the class numbers to avoid any of my former students recognizing another student’s number and combined various examples from different classes. This example is just on notebook paper instead of on a legal pad. 

This image is for the first page of the week.  I do a quick status of the class every day before beginning conferences.  I note the stage of the writing process each person is working on and the topic of the story.  When they move onto a new stage that week, I cross out their number and move them onto the next page.  This helps me keep up with someone who has been stuck way too long on a stage.  I use the second page to start the next new week.  If the student hasn’t moved to a new stage by the following Monday, their name won’t be on the next page.  I know I need to begin my conferences that week with that student and get them moving. 

I make general notes on each conference, usually focusing on something I need to remember. For example, I might note something I’m asking the student to share during share time that will be a good illustration for others.  I also make sure to note things I need to know to pull groups to work with.  You will see the groups I needed to work with noted at the bottom.  I would generally see these patterns as I conference.  Then, anytime I have a spare minute that week, I focus on those problem areas in small groups.  If not, I would make them a priority to begin the next week. 

The final column on the page is a skill check.  I would use that information for RTI, which for me is also a small group in my class time.  I do not have built in writing RTI time during the day as our school only focuses on reading/math during our RTI block.  You will notice that I didn’t have rows of data to prove mastery.  I don’t keep up with weeks of correct/incorrect answers.  I simply decide when they have had time to master it, ask them to explain their thinking in answering, and I note if they know it or not.  I also note WHY they don’t know it. My writing spiral review makes this super easy to do.  Once I have re-taught the skill to those in need, I simply do another class check in about a week.  Hopefully, all of them will pass on.  Usually they do.  When they don’t, I continue the process.  For me, this usually is about the same time I begin after school tutorials, and those still struggling work on those skills then. 

I hope this gives you some ideas on how to create something simpler that works for you. I think the main thing to take away is not that this is the most amazing record keeping system in the world.  Instead, I want you to know that deciding what happens in RTI doesn’t take weeks worth of checklists.  I do think it requires some discussion between you and your students.  I also don’t think you need to record all of that discussion in paragraph form.  You just need enough information to note what the actual problem really is. 

After you decide how to record it, your next biggest decision is how to springboard that conversation in a way that helps you actually determine mastery. I will share some reading ideas soon. 

My next post will be an example of how I determine skill mastery in writing using my weekly spiral review.   My hope is to get the actual spiral reviews out to my subscribers by the first or second week in August.  I’m working on it—between naps.  🙂

I hope you get to nap today too, and I would love to hear your ideas on keeping things simple in the classroom. 

RTI Data for ELAR

Several years ago, I worked for a school that went through the IR (Improvement Required) process after a year of poor state assessment scores.  If you are in the middle of that storm, I feel you.  It was tough.  However, at the end of that process, I really felt like I had made a lot of growth as a teacher.

One thing always struck me as wrong  from that time, and it has bothered me tremendously.  As you probably already know, the process for RTI (Response-To-Intervention) is meant to be this: a students receives instruction in the classroom…a teacher identifies a student need in the area of instruction….a teacher formulates and executes a plan to address this need.  If a students doesn’t respond to this plan, a new plan is formulated based on that response (or lack thereof).

I realize this is an over-simplification of RTI, but I don’t intend this article to be about RTI.  What I want to discuss is the process by which a teacher identifies the needs of a student because that has been a real sticking point for me.

Always when talking about RTI, you will hear the phrase “data-driven instruction.” I don’t think you will find a teacher out there who doesn’t make decisions on how to approach their class instruction based on some kind of data.  My issue is what KIND of data that is.

So often we think that data must come from some kind of black-and-white source, like a formal science experiment of sorts.  Here is the problem.  That doesn’t work for us.

Here is an example from a reading class:

The teacher is asked by admin to assess the needs of her  reading class  based on target skills on state assessments. The teacher decides to target main idea for this RTI cycle.  She teaches main idea skills in class, and the students practice the skill in a variety of settings, including worksheets/assessments with multiple-choice questions.  The teacher than looks at the results of the classwork (right/wrong answers).  Often, the teacher is required to document the correct/incorrect answers in order to “document” their data.   The teacher chooses the students to re-teach based on this data and plans several different ways to work on the skill.  The very first day of RTI the teacher finds that all but one of the students have already mastered main idea.

Why does this happen?  You probably already know.  The teacher never talked to the students about their mistakes with main idea.  It is virtually impossible to totally isolate most reading and writing skills.  Tracking student mastery based on right/wrong answers only works for basic skills like identifying a letter or sound.  It does NOT work for comprehension skills because so many things work together to make comprehension happen.  Forget about making this work for making inferences too.   Don’t even get me started on tracking writing skills this way.

One thing I find when talking to students about their misunderstandings and mistakes is that the reasons are always so varied.  One maybe missed the main idea question because they didn’t know an important vocabulary word or couldn’t sound out some of the words. Maybe they didn’t have enough background knowledge to understand the story. Often it has nothing to do with being able to determine main idea.

This is why I think we should trash all of our pretty data binders and just buy a spiral notebook and take some notes! Why are we wasting our time trying to track individual skills that are nearly impossible to accurately track??  We are NOT research scientists.  We are teachers of human beings.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t base our lessons on what our students need.  I’m saying we shouldn’t waste our time and energy basing our lessons on things we “think” they need based on two or three standardized  assignments or assessments.  Instead, why don’t we just ASK them?

Instead of marking down all their correct/incorrect responses on a chart or spending thousands on a computer program that prints out stacks of reports on assessments, why don’t we sit down with the student and test at a table and say…”Tell me a little bit about your thinking when you came to this question.”  Not only is it quicker and cheaper, I guarantee you it will peel back the layers and give you a peak into what is really going on .

In a recent episode of Teacher Me, Teacher about brain science, Jared Horvath says, “Evidence gets to be defined field-by-field-by field…as teachers you are not beholden to the same evidence scientists are.  You get to define what evidence means for you, if it’s conversations, if it’s recordings, if it’s artwork, but just because you get to define your evidence, doesn’t mean you don’t have to collect it.”

We don’t need to stop collecting information.  Instead, we need to stop collecting evidence based on what other people think seems scientific and reliable and collect data that helps us make real, true, informed decisions.  You can spend days and months making the pretty notebooks filled with pages and pages of checklists all you want and still miss the mark by a mile.

I’m tired of seeing teachers fill our form after form, spend hours on data walls, only to find their work inaccurate.  How often do we spend weeks on lessons reteaching main idea when what the student needed all along was decoding or vocabulary skills?

We need to stop letting some ritualistic form of data collection get in the way and stand up and be the experts we actually are.

–end off-topic rant–

In my next post, I am going to show you my data and how I keep up with it.

Using Expiration Dates in the Classroom

When I was growing up, my mom would always say, “Use your own brain!  If you use all of mine up, I won’t have enough left for me!” I always thought that was the silliest thing in the world to say.  Not anymore.

One problem I have noticed the last few years in my classroom has been students who rely heavily on me and other room resources to hold information instead of attempting to remember it on their own.  I am sure that is partially due to easy access to information in their daily lives, but I also think the blame mostly rests on me.

Two years ago, I was teaching reading and writing.  I am a firm believer in a daily spiral review of basic skills and vocabulary.  One early spring day, I heard one student lean over and ask another student what first person meant.  The student responded with, “How can you not know that?? We have been doing this every day for months?”  This really struck me.  How could they not know?

Then I looked around the room at all of my anchor charts.  I thought about how I had literally encouraged students to ask each other if they needed help, especially during guided reading groups. Why would they make any effort to remember it?  I had given them every reason not to even try.

Since then, I have slowly been making some shifts on my part to make sure I was encouraging students to take more ownership over their own learning.  It is not a magic-bullet, of course, but I have seen some really big improvements.

The one single thing that I have done that I have seen the most impact from has been to use expiration dates.  Each time we learn something new, I post an anchor chart or even something as small as a note card with the rule or definition.  At the bottom, I write when that card or chart will expire.  I really did this for my benefit.  I am really bad about allowing kids to just use me as an answer source when they forget rules/definitions.  Now when a student basically uses me as Google, I look at our chart/definition area.  If the answer is there, I send them to look.  If the answer is not there, I simply say, “I’m sorry. That information has expired. You will need to go look in the rule book.”  I don’t even have to keep up with the expiration dates.  My students watch those dates like little hawks.  If I am so much as one minute late taking them down, they will squawk!

My rule book is nothing more than some old folders I re-purposed.  I simply printed out each rule that expired and put them in the folders.  Each folder has the same information.  This way no one has to wait to look things up.  I currently have twelve identical rule folders in a crate.  Here is a copy of my rule folder we are using right now:

Rule Book

The students do not like to have to go dig through the folders since there is a lot of pages to go through.

I warned the students that once January arrived, they would not longer be allowed to use the rule book without both writing the rule they looked up AND telling the rule verbally to both another student and me.  I explained that it was important for them to know this information without having to look it up because they would need to know this information in order to recognize mistakes in their own writing and to do well on the STAAR test. Writing the rule would provide a visual reminder and speaking it would provide an auditory way of remembering the rule as well.

Since we have been doing more STAAR multiple-choice lately, I also ask students to find the rule that matches the questions they missed and write that by the question.  We then discuss how that rule would have helped them get that question right when we conference over their papers.

Sometimes I honestly feel a little mean about not “helping.” Here’s the thing though…when I am overly helpful, it isn’t really doing anything to benefit the student.  I am keeping them from learning.  Worst of all, I communicate to them a lack of respect.  If I really felt like they could learn it, why would I keep letting them get by with not??

I think this is why none of my students have complained thus far about taking on the responsibility of knowing these things on their own.  In fact, they are quite proud of what they know, and I am too.

 

How Do Teachers Come Up With These Crazy Supply Lists?

This is the time of year that all teachers dread.  Parents are hitting the stores, school supply lists in hand.  Inevitably, this means that the complaints begin flooding social media.

I clicked on a school supply shopping video a friend shared today because I thought it would be funny.  It was. The comments were not.  One person commented, “If I knew what all these supplies were for, I might feel a little better about buying them.”

This post is for you.

Your comment made me think hard about how school supply lists are handed out. Schools work best when parents and teachers are on the same team.  Perhaps teachers should be doing a better job of explaining the game plan for all this equipment instead of just calling the plays.

So here goes…..

Photo Credit: Marco Verch, Color Pencils on White Background,  CC BY 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/CnENFy

 

Why are there so many pencils?  Why does my teacher ask for a certain brand or pencil type?

This one is the complaint I hear the most.  Here is the math:

36 pencils= One pencil per week.  If your list has anything less, your teacher has already purchased at least enough on their own to make up the difference.  One pencil per week may seem outrageous to you, but I guarantee you that it is not.  Your child is likely in a content classroom up to 6 hours a day.  If they spend even half of each class using a pencil, that’s three hours a day.  That’s up to 15 hours a week using one pencil.  Think how many times they will sharpen it.  What if your pencil for the week breaks?  If you have really small children, this number is usually even higher than 36 because they are not adept at using a sharpener or keeping up with supplies. We all wish we knew where all those lost pencils go.  Perhaps it is the same place all the socks end up?

There is a reason teachers ask for specific pencil brands as well.  Many brands of pencils are almost impossible to sharpen.  If your child’s teacher has an older sharpener, this is even more of a problem.  I have seen students try to sharpen a brand new pencil and end up with nothing but a broken nub.

If your child’s teacher asks for a mechanical pencil, they may be in a situation where they don’t have a reliable sharpener at all.  It might also be the case they just don’t like to deal with students standing at a sharpener for five minutes only to sit down with a broken pencil nub.

Why so many glue sticks?  Why do I need to buy glue sticks AND bottles of glue?

See the math above.  Your child’s teacher most certainly calculated how much glue an average student needs per week when determining the number on the list. Also included in that number are some extras. Glue doesn’t always work out the way you think.  Sometimes a glue stick gets rolled out too far and breaks, meaning you just lost half a glue stick.  Bottle glue loves to clog and get dried out.  I literally go and hand check each glue bottle to make sure they are shut tightly after each class.  Still, there will be some that just don’t work next time.   One plus to having a lot of glue on the supply list is that it means your child’s teacher has designed a lot of hands-on actives.

If you see glue sticks and glue bottles on your list, it is because different type of glue are better for different activities.  Glue sticks work best when you are gluing paper to paper and want it to dry quickly.  These are usually used in journals and composition books.  If you are gluing a heavy paper or another material, it won’t stay together using a glue stick.

 

Why do I need a specific folder color or type of folder? 

The teacher asks for a specific color usually so that your child can keep up with it and get to class with the correct supplies easily.  For instance, if your child has five different folders, it is easier for them to look for the red folder when going to math, the blue folder when going to reading, etc.  This is not something you will see often once your child gets older.  We are trying to train them to do this on their own in the lower grades. Our lives are so much easier when we can say to an entire class, “Don’t forget to get your red folder.”  You would think that a child could remember which one is their math folder, right?  Wrong.  Sometimes they are still struggling in May.   Is it the end of the world if you can’t find the right color?  Probably not, but it really helps if it is.

Plastic vs Paper

Yes, we know the paper folders are cheaper.  We also know your child is going to tear it in only a few weeks. A plastic folder will last at least half a year, sometimes longer with care.

Brads and Pockets

If your child’s teacher asks for these, please take the time to open the folder up and check it before you buy it. If the teacher asks for brads, it is because they need your child to put something there.  Same thing with pockets.  If you buy the wrong folder, the teacher ends up buying the right one so that your child can stay organized.

Why am I buying household supplies? 

I know it may seem irritating to buy disinfectant wipes, plastic baggies, and paper bags. If you simply can’t afford to buy everything on the school supply list, this is the place to cut.  We need them, and we use them, but we would rather you buy the right pencils and folders.  Maybe even offer to send them later in the year when you have a little more cash.  We will run out and be so happy to see refills.

I think the disinfectant wipes don’t really need explanation, but I will add a quick line.  Your teacher wants to keep your child healthy.  Period. I guarantee you it is not to clean our bathrooms at home.

Plastic baggies are used for so many things it is hard to list them all:

Teeth ( So, so many teeth)

Cards (flashcards, cards to study for a test, games)

Broken jewelry and hair accessories ( This happens in my room at least once a week.  I’m serious.)

Science experiments

Organizing class supplies and materials

Class snacks

Paper bags are usually used to make little books, hands-on activities for journals, and party bags.

Why do I have to buy two sets of crayons, markers, map pencils, etc?

Remember that your teacher has already done the math about how much is needed each week.  This usually means that your child will use one set for the first half of the year and another set later on.  Parents sometimes assume that these extra sets are for students who don’t bring supplies.  This is seldom the case.  Even if your teacher has a supply sharing system set up where the supplies go in a common tub, the number of supplies is usually determined by how much the teacher estimates EACH individual child will need.  Those not purchased by the parents are purchased by us as the year progresses.

I am sure there are many other supplies on your child’s list this year that I didn’t explain.  Hopefully you now see that your teacher has a good reason for asking for it.  If you are not sure about why something is on the list, just ask.  Most likely, they will be happy to explain.

Most of us are parents too, so we totally understand how hard it is to scrounge enough cash to buy so much at one fell swoop.  If you are struggling with supplies, there is no shame in just sending what you can, when you can.  We have been there too, and we will love your little babies whether they have two packs of crayons or none.