State Testing Reflections - Helping Students Transfer Skills

State testing is an area I think about a lot, as I am sure would be true for the majority of teachers in this age of emphasis on testing. Yet, it is a fine balance to stay true to personal philosophies while also trying to help students succeed when they are in testing settings. My goal for my students is about more than meeting or exceeding on a state test, I want them to be life long readers and writers. I feel very fortunate to have had many professional development opportunities to help me shape who I am as an educator striving to give my students the best educational experience possible. 


Writing a post about testing was on my blogging to-do list. This morning when I read a post on the topic over at A Teaching Life, I started to write a comment with my thoughts on the topic and quickly realized the time to write my post had come. I have heard often that if students are in an environment where they read and write often, they will succeed on assessments - simple as pie. Yet, in the post that I read this morning the educator asks, "Will this transfer (as all the research says it should) to their test taking abilities?" Something that my school learned was that in some cases there were students who were not performing as well on assessments as expected because of lack of knowledge of the way the assessment questions/prompts are set up.


However, one of the reasons I love the environment where I teach is that rather than throwing out all of our promising practices and exchanging them for canned curriculum in response to the testing hysteria, we problem solved to think about what we could do to help bridge this gap while maintaining our school's philosophy. Our state, Oregon, provides testing specifications and blueprints that include stem questions. Paired up with an emphasis on data teams to be more cognizant of our students' academic strengths and weaknesses to better inform instruction, being able to create some opportunities for our students to familiarize themselves with transferring the skills they use everyday as readers, writers, scientists, mathematicians, etc. has been essential to some students' improved performance on state assessments. 


As I am typing and realizing how much I have to say and reflect upon with the topic, my one to-do list testing post has quickly transferred into a list for a series of posts. This week I will be posting more about this process, as well as other testing aha moments and the success of other ideas I learned from the blogging community, such as teaching prompt writing as a genre.