This is the second year that a significant component of teacher evaluation involves the testing success of students. Under that umbrella is the requirement that each teacher write and (hopefully) meet a specific goal for his or her students.
Here are the goals I wrote for myself this year, which includes some ideas from colleague’s ideas, too, and which were approved by my administration:
Standard 7.5i states that students will “summarize text relating supporting details” in “a variety of fictional texts, narrative nonfiction, and poetry.” Standard 7.6i states that students will “summarize text identifying supporting details” in “a variety of nonfiction texts.”
The 2013 Grade 7 Reading Pretest results show that seventh grade students need to do better in the areas of 7.5i and 7.6i. I administered an additional pretest based on 7.5i/7.6i to my students, and learned that a good number of them perform too close for comfort to or below an acceptable level regarding this skill. On the pretest, 29 of my 61 students (48%) of my students scored below 75%, and 12 of my 61 students (25%) scored below 50%.
100% of my students who scored below 50% on the 7.5i/7.6i-based pretest “2013-2014 Summarization Assessment” and who maintain an in-class Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) participation grade of at least 75% will show improved abilities by earning mid-year or post-test “Summarization” scores that are higher than their pretest scores by at least 30% of their pretest scores. Furthermore, 50% of my students earning a score of 50%-65% on the 7.5i/7.6i-based pretest and who maintain an in-class SSR participation grade of at least 75% will show improved abilities by earning mid-year or post-test scores that are higher than their pretest scores by at least 20% of their pretest scores or that are at least 70%.
Students not meeting these testing goals can alternatively show growth by raising their Instructional Reading Levels by at least one grade level for the students in the 100% group or by at least a half grade level for those in the 50% group as indicated by the beginning-of-the-year and mid-year or end-of-year STAR assessments.
Note that I was careful to include a student responsibility component (SSR), an alternative indicator of student growth (the STAR assessment) that easily shows progress, and achievable numbers. I wanted these goals to be as fail proof as possible.
Just last week I gave my mid-year “Summarazation Assessment.” I could only hope that since I generally provide virtually no direct instruction regarding “summarization” (I prefer to focus on fun things like great literature and meaningful essays, both of which implicitly include summarizing practice), this test would show that students have already met my goals for them.
And it did. My students blew the test out of the water, notably:
BV (who read that National Geographic caption about the Hunan Province) improved his score from 10% to 30%.
PT (hyperactive, six feet tall, loud, and smart) went from 30% to 80%.
TH (who generally does nothing in all of his classes) scraped in a near-30% increase by going from 35% to 45% (just shy of the needed 45.5%; my principal said he considers this meeting the goal).
The students whose scores decreased all scored high enough on the pretest that they didn’t fall into one of my goal groups, and therefore their brain degeneration does not dampen my sense of accomplishment as an awesome teacher…or at least goal writer.
