Dibels Problems, (not specifically Dibels fault)

These are my DIBELS scores from the 4th day of school.  Look pretty good don’t they.  The biggest problem was that it was the 4th day of school.  The second biggest problem is that my school wanted me to use these scores to drive instruction.  They gave me a break too.  They said I didn’t have to progress monitor the strategic or benchmark kids until January.  So basically, the Intensive kids are the focus……..  Only one problem with that.  My TRUE intensive kids aren’t really in the intensive group as based on these scores.  Only one of them is, the second one down.  This child is a non-English speaking Hispanic child and consistently scores low.

FOUR other intensive kids are down in the middle of the strategic group.  How did they get there?  They made some good guesses or got lucky on maybe one or two questions on the Initial Sound Fluency test.  That test has 16 questions that go something like this.  (looking at 4 pictures ) Pointing to each one, “These are star, flower, letters, and goat.  Which one begins with /g/? “  Three like that and one like this, “What sound does flowers begin with?”  This assessment is timed, and scored based on a formula that uses the amount of time and the number of correct responses to arrive at a score.  Shorter time = higher score.  I had one little boy who would point to ANY picture just as soon as you finished asking (which stops the clock until the next question)  but had NO IDEA about sound/word relationships.  He STILL has no phonemic awareness. Interestingly, almost all of the kids that scored zeros on the Letter Naming Fluency are my true Intensive kids.  But ONE test is not a reliable indicator.  The bottom kid in the intensive group (the one with 2 zeros) has benchmarked on his ISF and knows almost all of his letters, upper and lower case and almost all of his sounds.

I LIKE DIBELS,  I just think it’s not being used correctly at my school.  As a teacher, I need to be able to adjust my groups based on ON GOING assessments.  Subsequent  progress monitoring, not required by the school, but done by me, supports my assessment of the ability levels of these kids.  But my school and my district continue to ask about and require specific interventions for the original 4 kids, not the group that REALLY needs it.  I was told that I couldn’t adjust my groups, at least not that bottom one.

Reading First

When I came to my new school this fall, I was told that it was a “Reading First” school, going into year 4 or 5 of the grant, which ever year, we are in the final year.  No “Reading First” as such next year,  at least any part of it that involves spending money.  I was a little curious about “RF” knowing nothing about it, and asked some questions, the reading specialist initially got a little huffy and told me, “It’s BEST PRACTICES, if you don’t want to do it, why did you come here?”  Which wasn’t MY point in asking the questions in the first place, I had just come off of the best year of teaching kindergarten and reading that I had ever had, and was on a kind of high about that, I wanted to be able to replicate it.  I wasn’t sure how much “RF” was going to impact that.  Trophies and most other components of my reading program are the same at the new school.

Well, it hasn’t much.  I’ve only had one specialist into my room on two different occasions, for relatively short times and little to no feed back.  Anything they have suggested, I’ve tried to implement.  Today, we had State visits.  I  had just finished the Whole group instruction and was breaking up for seatwork, centers and small group instruction when the five of them came in.  They blew in, and less than 10 minutes later, they blew back out.  I gather they will be back around tomorrow, and one of them will meet with me on my prep to talk about my reading program, but other than that, I’m still pretty much in the dark.

I have a hard time turning 5 year olds loose in centers unsupervised,  Centers should be developmentally appropriate, they should be differentiated, and meaningful.  Not too hard, but not too easy, yet something that they can do on their own with a minimal amount of help.  Well that’s easier said than done.  My high group are beginning readers.  My bottom group know fewer that 10 letters and sounds a piece.  The groups in the middle, are, in the middle.  It’s difficult to make centers that meet all of those needs and criteria.  So many center activities are so time consuming to make, who’s got the time?  I’m already spending 10 to 15 hours a week outside of class on school work.  If I had a life, I couldn’t do that. Those super teachers, that everyone hears about, like “The Essential 55″ by Ron Clark, they don’t have a life outside of teaching, and when they get a life, their teaching changes.  You cannot do a 30 year career burning your energy at that level.

I tend to line them up with a number of pages of seat work, the seat work is work based on the worksheets they have in Trophies, only more of it.  The typical Trophies worksheet, for example the one today, had four places on the page, for them to write a letter Nn.  And another page with maybe 20 letters on it, some of which are Nn’s, and they circle the Nn’s. That’s not worth the paper it takes to run it off.  So I do essentially the same activities, but they have to write more and find more letters.  Same skills, but more practice.  So everybody starts out doing the same seat work, it’s grade level appropriate, and as they work on it, some are going to computers, and some are working with me in small group.  As they finish their basic seat work, they then have a few centers that they can rotate into.  But the centers aren’t the main work at this time, they are ancillary to the seat work which everybody does first.  I think that this approach might not be the way they want me to do it.  We’ll see.

The three days before school begins.

These three days before school starts are filled with meetings and a mad rush to get the rooms and everything else ready for the first day of school, which for most of the teachers at my school and in the rest of the district, means that school starts on Monday. I have to do the three days of meetings, even though my class doesn’t begin until Sept. 15. The hard thing about teaching at a year round school for most teachers is how little time there is between the end of one year and the beginning of the next. Most of our teachers just ended their contracted year on August 11 and they reported back to work yesterday for the new year. So they didn’t get much of a break. In kindergarten that means shifting your thinking from kids that are basically at First Grade one day to two weeks later facing beginning of the year kindergarteners and all that that entails.

One of the things about teaching in a year round setting is that at any given time part of the school is on break.  And this year, I’m on the rotation that has our very first break the first three weeks of school (I guess SOMEONE has to do it).

My new school is doing many of the things and programs that I was doing at my other school. The one NEW thing that is different is that this school is a Reading First school. I know that it means more people in and out of my room while I teach, and that both I and my teaching will be monitored and supported more than I have been used to in the past. Today was the first day that I got really good information about what that really looks like and what it entails. I think I’m going to like it, it makes sense to me. I’m sure that I will have to make some adjustments, but Reading First gives me support in making those changes in my teaching. And really, best practices are best practices. They don’t change, so I’m thinking I might not have to change as much as I thought I would.

I do know that we are going to be jumping into interventions for the Tier II kids kids sooner than I have in the past. Last year we started our Voyager intervention groups in January. Another thing that will be kind of hard is that the District mandated window for the first Benchmark tests in Dibels just happens to fall on the very first week my kids are in school. THAT’S just going to be wonderful. All other kindergarten kids in the district, in all of the regular 9 month schools, and in all of the year round schools on the other calendar retations other than mine, (80% of the year round students) will have been in school for at least two weeks prior to taking the assessments.

The New Room

OK, now I’m getting excited. Yesterday I went by my new school and got my room assignment. I went by the room and took some pictures so that I could begin planning the layout. I won’t actually be able to get into it for a few more days yet. What is SO cool about it is that it was actually made as a kindergarten classroom. At my old school, in the 18 years I was there, the kindergarten rooms were never used for kindergarten. In one of the rooms there was a long entrenched preK program. And the other room was used for special ed early childhood programs.

The room has two bathrooms, two storage closets, two sinks, four bulletin boards and two white dry erase boards. I should have three Waterford computers and three classroom networked computers. Our school programs are, for Reading, Trophies by Harcourt, supplemented by Reading First, Voyager Learning (we get handhelds for scoring and administering the Dibels tests), and Waterford; our math program is enVision Math by Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley (new this year).

Voyager – Ticket to Read

I have some very high kids in my kindergarten class this year. While we have done a LOT of language arts, reading skills work, we have not done a lot of actual reading in reading groups this year. Since I’m working with the lower kids with interventions to try to get them caught up, I have wanted to find something for the high kids to do. One of the things I looked at was Ticket to Read from Voyager. We do Voyager in all grade levels at our school and a lot of kids are excited about Ticket to Read. In looking at it though, the kids are placed in the program based on their Reading Connected Text/Oral Reading Fluency scores and those are Dibels Tests that they don’t get until they are in First Grade. However, there is a way to go into the management part of the program and manually set their levels.

Yesterday, I took my highest student into the program and walked him through the first reading activity and he can do it. He’s exceptionally high for my class though, so I wasn’t sure if anyone else could do it. Today I took the next two highest kids and tried them as well and they can do it. That means that the three of them are reading at a level somewhere in the middle of first grade or higher. In the afternoon I tried the next three kids with high scores and it was a little too hard for them. But I’m happy that the first three can do something that is a little more challenging and structured.

Analyzing Dibels Scores – Reading

I mentioned the other day that I had finished giving all of my kids the requisite DIBELS tests. I’ve been analyzing the scores and rearranging my groups.

It’s interesting to see how the scores break the groups down. I still have a group of 6 kids who I would label “at risk”. Two extremely so, and the other four not so bad. Even the two have made significant progress, just not enough to be at grade level and we are running out of time. We have about seven weeks of school left. So they comprise a group of six who will continue to get extra interventions through the end of the year. According to my result page on the Voyager website, which groups by Struggling, Emerging, or On Track, I only have two in the Struggling category. However, the other four, while not as bad, are still weak in two areas of the three we tested.

What’s amazing is what happens when it clicks for some kids. I have two who went from Medium at-risk to my very top group. One little girl’s score is the second highest score in the class and she was in my intervention group in January. It’s funny, because we work with words and language all day, but don’t often get to sit down and read an actual book. The kids are learning more than they think. I’ve had a number of them tell me that they can’t read, and then when I get out one of the readers, they read it just fine.

There is a huge determining factor in their PERCEPTIONS of what they can or can’t do. If they THINK they can’t read, then you can have a hard time convincing them otherwise. Which is funny, but it probably has a lot to do with the way I am teaching reading. If we actually got the leveled readers out and read them more, they would probably see themselves more as readers. Most of them have the skills, they just don’t know it. Or they don’t have someone that can sit down with them and practice reading. And in class, we only have so many minutes in the day. As the year starts to wind down though, we should have more time to actually get to the leveled readers in small groups. In kindergarten, so much time is spent in getting them where they can work independently so that you CAN do small groups.