What's Your Superpower for the New Year?

School is back in session here at CISD and our kiddos are so excited to be back at school!  Okay, maybe not all of them--but most of them!  As much as we enjoy being home with our family and loved ones, it is especially nice to hear the excited little voices exclaim our names when we walk through the doors in the morning, as if we are some sort of celebrities.

To many of our kids, we do have celebrity status.  We are their heroes--Superheroes--the people who are always there for them.  We have a great opportunity to change the lives of these children forever, to give them the tools, knowledge, and skills they need to be successful in this ever-changing world.  That is a tremendous amount of responsibility but it is also an amazing honor. So, now is the time to change some lives!

What Superpower will you be using in these next few weeks and months to challenge the thinking of your students? 

What's your superpower?
Photo courtesy of Glitter and Tulle Boutique

As we set our plans for the second semester in motion, we will need all kinds of Superpowers to make sure our kiddos are successful.  We'll need powers of planning, powers of data review, powers of implementation, and critical-thinking powers! Our kiddos will need these powers, too! We all know that state assessments are looming for most of our kids and it is very easy to let the weight of those assessments bring us down.  But we cannot think of state assessments as kryptonite! The approaches that we take in our teaching, the ones that incorporate higher level thinking skills into the curriculum can fundamentally change the way our students approach problem-solving,  will not only prepare them for assessments, it will prepare them for life. We need to make sure that we are incorporating as many of these higher-level thinking skills into our lessons plans as possible so that our kiddos grow their super-strengths and are able to defeat all of lives challenges, not just the Evil State Assessments.

As you reflect on the first half of the school year, how do you feel about where your students are? Your answers to these questions may increase your superpowers.   How do you feel about your approach to teaching--have you pushed hard enough and asked tough questions?  Have you made learning fun and engaging?  How have you differentiated for those learners who need scaffolding or more challenging work?  Now is the perfect time to reflect on where our students were, where they are now, and where they need to be.  The next question is, how do we get them where they need to be?

Knowing the exact level of super-strengths (a.k.a. knowledge and skills) each of your students currently has in reading is critical.  If you're not exactly sure what each student is capable of when it comes to reading, there are some great tools that you can use to gather this information. If you have access to a Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) or something similar, this  would give you great information about specific reading skills for each student.  Reading A-Z has a similar product with their Benchmark Assessments. You can check those out by visiting the Reading A-Z website here.   IStation can also give us some great information as to what our readers can and cannot do.  If you're not familiar with this amazing program, you can check it out here.  Every student in your classroom needs a clear-cut plan to grow his or her Superpower of Reading to maximum capacity by the end of the year.

Are your little superheroes ready to  fly?
Photo courtesy of Glitter and Tulle Boutique

In CISD, one way that we have done this with our third grade readers is to give a reading benchmark assessment to determine where our students are currently reading and then classroom teachers and I (the Reading Specialist)  created an end goal for each student. For most, this will be the end-of-year reading level expectation for third grade.  However, for our students who have special needs or other challenges, this may vary.  We looked at how many weeks we had until the student needed to meet that end-of-year goal and set check-points along the way.  We will be able to carefully monitor the progress of each student this way, in order to determine whether or not he or she is making adequate gains.  If not, we will need to adjust our teaching strategies to meet the individual needs of each student.  If a student isn't meeting check-point expectations, we will need to begin discussing what we can do differently, exactly where the student is struggling, and pinpoint our instruction to those exact skills.  Without the data from the benchmark and the subsequent check-points, we won't have a clear picture as to whether or not the student is making adequate progress until it's too late.  Knowing each of our students and their strengths and weaknesses is critical.

If you haven't done so, I strongly suggest you go back and look at your data and create a plan for each of your students.  If you need help doing this, ask a reading specialist, academic coach, team leader, or administrator to help you.  If you feel you don't have adequate data on all of your students, discuss what resources are available to you so that you can find out exactly what reading skills each of your students currently has and what they need to learn next, in order to successfully meet grade-level expectations.  Great discussions leads to great teaching, which leads to great learning so don't be afraid to approach a colleague to talk about your student data.

It's a new year full of new opportunities. Soon, these students will be on someone else's class roster.  When they leave your classroom, will they be prepared?  Let's use all of our superpowers to make sure all of our kiddos move on knowing everything they need to in order to be successful next year and for all of the new years to come.