Conversation with Observer (Excerpt)
OBSERVER: Hey Darius, I know you’ve done a lot of thinking and preparation for this upcoming year. Can you tell me a little about how you set your goal, “Second Graders by June!”? [Points to the goal poster on the wall]
DARIUS: Definitely. “Second Graders by June” is really just the rallying cry I use with my students. There’s a lot more thinking that went into setting my goals. Basically, I spent the last couple weeks really unpacking my standards and isolating the key end-of-course knowledge and skills, as well as the enduring understandings and culminating performance-based assessments for 1st grade reading and math in St. Louis. I translated all of this into an excel spreadsheet that provides me the destination skills and assessment tools from which I can backwards plan. [Pulls up the excel spreadsheet] Let me walk you through a couple key skills I’ve identified. First graders need to have a reading fluency of 60 words per minute on average, which – among other things -- requires learning all sound-symbol correspondences. First graders should also feel comfortable summarizing and identifying the main idea of a text. For math, this means mastering addition and subtraction and being able to apply those computations in multiple-step problems.
OBSERVER: Wow, it seems like you’ve broken down your curriculum pretty extensively to isolate your knowledge and skill targets.
DARIUS: Well, understanding the first grade curriculum deeply was just the first step. I knew that I’d want to set goals of 1.5 years growth in reading and math for each of my students. So, next I had to find meaningful assessments which would measure this growth. In order to do this, I began researching performance on the third grade literacy test in Missouri and I found out that a significant portion of students fail the high-stakes test in reading in third grade because they don’t have adequate readiness, which leads to students being held-back and, over time, increased dropout rates. Students reading at second grade by the end of first grade would be critical for students to be on the pathway to academic success. Therefore, I decided I would use the well-respected DRA to measure actual reading performance (including fluency), as well as the NWEA to gauge comprehension skills on a more objective basis. For math, I will use the growth-focused NWEA, as well as a standards-aligned diagnostic and end of course exam that includes a problem solving component that requires students to write about their thinking.
OBSERVER: I know you said that getting students to a beginning second grade level by the end of the year will be crucial to ensuring that they pass the third grade. Will 1.5 years growth in reading and math put your students at this target?
DARIUS: That’s what’s really exciting. I administered diagnostic exams in my first week of school, including a kindergarten skills exam and discovered that my students range from pre-primer to early first grade. That means that all but a handful of students will be at a second-grade level by the end of the year, the handful will be within half a year or closer, and my most prepared students will be past that point. Similarly, in math, my growth goals will put all but a handful of students on a second-grade level by the end of the year and more advanced students will be performing at a higher level on the NWEA.