Data Meetings

Running Records:

• Create one SCHOOL WIDE system for collecting running record data that shares the same format
• Determine how many times you want to collect data before the year begins
  • Once every 6 weeks?
  • Once a quarter?
  • Will it be the same for all readers (emergent readers? Above reading level readers?)
  • Determine how to make it sustainable for teachers J
    • (NOT SUSTAINABLE!!!) Doing it in your classroom (sorry- it’s really hard!)
    • (Sustainable, but data is mixed) Each guided reading teacher collects data and shares with reading teachers
    • (Sustainable, but harder on the team) Reading teacher gets a day to collect data every six to eight weeks
  • It’s not about how fast the kids move up- don’t push them to “On Beyond Z”

1. Running Records Data Meeting – 45 to 60 minutes

• After each running record cycle, schedule a running records data meeting with reading teachers on each grade level
• Ask, “How did the running records go? How can we make it better for next time? How can I help?”
• Sort data from lowest to highest on excel.
• Ask, “What stood out?”
• “Who are you concerned about?  Why?” (Make a critical reading list)
• Create an action plan for each student .
• Ask, “Are we moving the highest readers too fast?  What can we do to meet their needs? How can I help?”
• Ask, “How can we celebrate their growth? How can we make it visible?”
• What’s our goal for the students that we are concerned about by the next time we meet?

1. Standardized Assessment Data Meeting

In addition to running record data, ask teachers to bring their weekly standardized testing data to the data meeting (which you can hold simultaneously to the running record meeting or the following week).

Ask:

• What do you notice?
• What do you predict?
• What are your concerns?
• How are you making their efforts visible?
• What are your end of quarter % goal for each kid? How will you convey that to the kids?
• Are there any kids on your critical reading list? Do they overlap with the critical reading list for the running records?
• What are your plans for the students who are on the critical reading list?

As a coach, the hardest part is staying on top of the action plans.  Be the note taker in the meetings, so during follow up conversations you can keep folks on top of their action plans.  In terms of action plans, prioritize:

1.  How do you plan on making their successes visible? (Turn around should be under a week.)
2. Do we need to change the intervention groups? (Intervention groups should be changed according to the most recent data.)
3. Individual student plans- make sure that they are getting the support they need on a consistent basis.  This support can include:
   1. For emergent readers: Additional guided reading, additional conferences (more later), test preparation conferences
   2. For students not moving up: individualized goals, habits conference
   3. For students above-standards: Literature circles, book clubs, independent reading analysis conferences

So far, there have been a few things that we’ve discussed:

1. Creating monthly data meetings for running records and test data
2. Making student data visible
3. Creating action items for “critical readers” and using one-on-one time to follow up in coaching meetings

What has resonated with you?

Continue Doing

Start Doing

Stop Doing

Data Meetings During One on One Coaching Sessions

1.         Teacher creates conference log. 

 What’s the criteria of the best conference log?

I like conference logs that allow you to see all students at once so no student slips through the cracks. These looks like an excel spreadsheet with enough room to write a quick jot like “pause at punctuation” or “don’t do bumper sticker theme”.

How’s it Going One on One

Materials: Teacher brings conference log only.

Ask:

1. How are the conferences going?
2. What do you want to keep doing?
3. What hasn’t been working? Why?
4. How are conferences going with your highest readers?
5. How many minutes do you spend per conference?
6. How can we help?
7. Which 3 students do you want to focus on for the meeting?

Then, the teacher walks through three students that s/he need help with.  By coaching the teacher in the previous questions, you are pushing the teacher (and yourself) to not only focus on the lowest readers- who often get the most attention.

The teacher talks through her dilemma with each kid.  The coach isn’t there to give answers.  Instead, try to get more information by asking:

1.  How is the reader at reading aloud? Decoding? Comprehension? How do you know?
2. What are the reader’s at home habits?
3. What is the reader’s listening level?
4. Describe the reader’s oral language.
5. What are the reader’s homework habits?
6. When is the last time you heard the reader read aloud?
7. What’s the reader’s favorite book? Favorite thing to do?
8. When does the reader get frustrated?

With the teacher, create end of the month goals (limit to three) for the reader.  These goals could look like:

1. To read-aloud with 97% accuracy a level L book
2. To pause at punctuation with 90% accuracy
3. To listen to a 2^nd grade level text and answer 2/3 comprehension questions
4. Using AR, to read 3 books at __ level and answer 90% comprehension questions with the book in front of you
5. To write 4-5 sticky notes per chapter for the next 3 books you read
6. When you get to a word on a page, to write it on a white board and chunk it at least 1 x per page
7. To describe your day in one minute without speaking in run-ons
8. To start your homework in school, by listening to a book on tape for 30 minutes
9. To read three books from the Diary of Wimpy kid series

Notice how these goals hit up oral language, listening and their habits!

1.  Reading Log/Class work/Reading Journal One on One

Materials: Student book log samples from high, medium and low student (teacher chooses the work sample)

Ask:

1.  Why did you choose these three students?
2. (Start with highest student)
   1. What does this student do well? (Make list)

-          Reads series books

-          Reads a lot of different types of books

-          Reads a lot of pages (for the most part) a night

1. Have you read any of the books that your student is reading? Which one is your favorite? Why?
2. What do you know about books that are similar to the books that your student is reading?
3. What’s something you could do to push them to the next level?
4. What choices are you giving your high readers? Are they being pushed to the same level that your lowest readers are?
5. What can you commit to doing with your higher readers by the next time we meet?
6. Repeat the same process with the medium and low student.
7. What are your possible next steps (Push toward the following à Whole class mini lessons that all readers can use & possible intervention and/or conferences) 

Using Real-Time Data

Real –time data comes from your classroom.  Each day, you teach your students a new mini lesson, and then you walk around to see who mastered the mini lesson using Criteria for Success OR you check their mastery using exit slips.  Real-Time Data could look like:

Other Ways to Share Data

• Using data from the most recent assessments, to schedule the next week’s worth of aims either in a one-on-one or in a group
• Videotaping a student’s running record whom you are concerned about ( including retell and questions that are answered) and bringing the video to the group
• Each reading teacher (in each grade) asks kids to do the same aim (i.e. ‘To ask questions as you read in order to access new knowledge or opinions about the book’) and then collect the high, medium and low from each class.  Post on board and reflect on what kids collectively are doing well, and what kids need to be pushed on.

Lots of folks ask about the AIM and CRITERIA FOR SUCCESS professional development.  This one is pretty easy to share because it’s fairly scripted.

Let me know if you have any questions.  By the way, NY State just announced that they are changing the standardized tests… I’ll let you know what we come up with as we change our do nows!  Oh jeez.

Maddie

via Sanford Calhoun high school

Here is a tip sheet on  Cornell Notes that will help make them a study tool, from Thomas Gunning’s Building Literacy in Content Areas (a great book!)

On an unrelated note, it makes me both sad and proud that when you search “dog pictures” in google images, this blog comes up 6th.  The picture is of a dachshund in a giraffe outfit… one of my favorites.

1.  How does Bud feel about being homeless and being a foster child?  It connected to what the book is about.

2. Why does Bud keep trying to find his father?  It helps me understand why Bud goes through so many troubles and obstacles.

3.  Is Bud going to be with Mr. Lewis for the whole trip? To determine what will happen and to see if Mr. Lewis will be a major character.

4.  Why does Bud still want to go to Grand Rapids if he has someone already? It deepends my understanding because maybe at the end of the book he might see his father.

5.  How does Bud feel about sharing his personal information with a stranger after he really realizes what he has done? I get to know more about Bud and how he feels when he does something wrong.

6.  What sickness did Bud’s mom die from? It deepnds our understanding because we know a little bit about why Bud’s father left.

You can see that we still need to build the reason why it deepens their understandings.  They are great at asking questions, but not great yet at accessing why they are doing the metacognitive strategies that they do.

Ellin Oliver Keene, in To Understand, writes

“In dozens of classrooms with kids of all ages and ‘ability levels,’ I read aloud and invited children to use the comprehension strategies, but I went to the next step- I asked them to define and describe what they understood after using the strategies that they might have missed if they hadn’t used them.  I asked them to describe what it is like when they truly understand.  I wanted to hear about their insights into texts, but also their experiences in the process of understanding.  I wanted to use their descriptions to define and describe the comprehension process- in terms of both cognitive and behavioral experiences- to others (p. 10, Keene).”

Later she says, “If instead I recast my language – “think about all the questions you have as I read and then pick one or two you think best help us understand more about the story (p. 14)…”

These quotes inspired me with my fifth grade class today, and led to a much more powerful seminar.  I love Keene’s idea- and connecting it to discussion makes it really sticky.  In the guided reading group (it’s a large group of 30 kids who are all on level V), we are reading Bud Not Buddy. In their partnerships, they generated 6 sticky notes each of questions that they felt deepened their understanding of the text.  (As they wrote these questions, I noticed a range of thick and thin questions). 

Like Keene recommended, I pushed them to pick the one sticky that they felt best helped their partnership better understand the story (I think doing this in partners is really important).  Then, they wrote why on the back.  Of the three partnerships that shared out, one felt the question got to a deeper understanding with the main character, Bud.  They reflected that the understanding would continue for the entire book.  Another felt that the question would give them insight about the ending.  The final one felt that the question linked to the most important part of the story.

Isn’t it interesting that all three of these questions were ultimately synthesis?

We then moved to the circle for the seminar.  The seminar focused  on the guiding question, “Which of Bud’s decisions do you disagree with?” While at first they danced around decisions that had ultimately happened recently in the chapter or were silly decisions, the kids then honed in on an animated debate over whether or not Bud should have left the orphanage for his quest (the whole premise of the book).

We connected back to the idea that those type of deepening questions really look at the book as a whole, in the same way that this discussion (their best yet) also analyzed the book as a whole.  It reminded me how important the synthesis strategy really is.

Cheese that smells like fish,

Old peanut butter on a chipped dish.

A broken pencil I didn’t use,

A pair of dog chewed tennis shoes.

Homework I didn’t turn in,

A small overflowing garbage bin.

The garbage I never took out,

A megaphone in which you can shout.

My science teachers vortacella,

Melted ice cream that is vanilla.

A kids notebook that I found,

Paper I got at the dog hound.

And finally I have to say,

A note from my mom I’m going to throw away!!

Here’s the lesson I wrote that goes with it:  01-LP-Six Traits-Ideas

Do you ever feel like this with student work? Use a reader's notebook.

Here are some sample reading notebook entries from students in the sixth grade.  I highly suggest doing it in a notebook rather than stickies… cheaper and neater and easier to grade!

Thank you to Amber who sent me these samples!

Great Journal 1

Great Journal 2

Great Journal 3

Check out some kids climbing to the top!

Looking for high level student essays?  Check out these from our 7th grade class.  Also, check out their blog at http://www.stabookski.wordpress.com

high level essays