Using your data

I had the honor yesterday of visiting a neighboring school in my district and helping their third and fourth grade teams interpret some data and develop a plan of action.  I was flattered when they asked to visit and observe my team and it was fun to take a "field trip" to their school and help them put their own data to use!

**Disclaimer: This post will be talking about NWEA (Northwest Evaluation Association) MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) assessment.  This is an assessment that my district has purchased to measure growth in reading and math three times per year.  I am in no way associated with NWEA other than the fact that I enjoy using the data from this assessment to inform my instruction and interventions**

I know that many schools use the MAP assessment to measure growth and so I thought that I might share the BASICS of what goes into our interpretation of the results in case it would be useful to you!

When your students take this assessment, they get a variety of scores- an overall RIT score and then each subject is broken down into smaller categories.  The overall RIT is a great snapshot into where they are performing and you can see where your students fall in relation to other students who take this assessment.  For example, the average third graders in the winter would score a 194 on the reading assessment so you would know if they are at, below or above the average.  You can also look at typical progress and see if they are exceeding growth expectations (always a plus :) ).  What I look at closely is the breakdown of the overall score which breaks reading into five strands: Comprehension, Word Skills, Variety of Purpose, Text Features, and Think Critically & Analyze.  I look at my kiddos and see where their strengths and weaknesses are according to those strands.  I can look even further into what score range they fall.  These numbers help me get an idea of what skills/learning expectations they are struggling with or which they have already mastered.  I use a handy dandy organizer to pencil the kiddos in based on what they are struggling with/need to move forward.  Now I am ready to group students and my instruction for those groups is much more focused.  Of course, this assessment doesn't give me the materials to teach those skills- so I am still creating, begging, borrowing, stealing, pinteresting, blogging, teacherspayteachersing, asking neighbors- in short- whatever it takes! :)

This is the organizer that we use- feel free to grab a copy!

My team has decided to take things a bit further this year.  We are a small school and have three third grade teachers with 60 students total.  So, we share our kiddos A LOT! For us, it is easy to keep up to date with the communication and the kids love that they get to have all of us as their teachers.  We have a 90 minute core reading block which we group based on those overall RIT scores I mentioned earlier (and our teacher judgment of course).  Then we have a 75 minute math block that we group the same way.  AND THEN, we have a 30 minute intervention time that we group based on those strands I talked about earlier.  I am teaching an algebra strand right now for math intervention.

How do you all meet the learning needs of all your kiddos? Do you "share" kids with other teachers? Or do you have small groups in your classroom? Or both/all of the above :) ?