State Testing Reflections - Data Teams

Last year my school started the official process of data teams, putting the spotlight on the importance of holding ourselves accountable to collecting a wide variety of student data and using it to inform our instruction. Another important piece to this process is collaborating as colleagues. Sometimes this means we meet with our grade level teams, as language teams (Spanish teachers and English teachers), content area teams, or as a whole staff. Our director frequently dedicates time at our regular staff meetings to share celebrations or new ideas as a group. While my 7th graders obviously are not working toward the same standards as the kindergarten class, as teachers we are still able to learn from each other and the processes we are using to become better practitioners.

My growth as a teacher has come from a combination of experience, support and training at my school, as well as self-directed professional development through wide reading and blogging. While I will continue revamping and fine tuning, here is a glimpse into how data teams comes into play with my current unit on inferencing in reading.

We had a brief focus on inferencing earlier in the year, but it was apparent that students could still benefit from a longer, more in depth unit on inferencing. As a result, we will be spending our remaining Spanish weeks focusing on the area. I just gave my students a pre-test on inferencing. I took an excerpt from Julia Alvarez's En busca de milagros with open-ended questions eliciting different types of inferencing that we will be emphasizing. The initial data collected from the pre-test will give me a better ideas of where my students are right now, combined with observations throughout the year from a variety of sources.

Next week we will continue on with focus lessons, drawing on ideas from When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do, Mosaic of Thought, I Read It, But I Don't Get It, and Middle School Readers. I will collect data through informal observations during focus lessons, anecdotal records during conferencing, quick checks with an iTouch during independent reading, student application of inferencing in their reader's notebooks and reading response letters, application with unfamiliar texts and state stem questions, as well as the post test.

With data teams I have been able to use data teams in combination with state blueprints and specifications to help students make the link between our independent reading with more authentic responses and state testing reading selections. Students see how they can use the same strategies with their own reading and recognize the type of wording used on state assessments. This way the bulk of my instructional time is focused on authentic self-selected reading and conferencing with adults and peers, yet there is still a piece in place for students to be aware of how the state assessment (and other assessments) work.