Part of the joy of planting a garden is watching it change through the seasons: daffodils lead into tulips and bluebells, followed by roses and peonies, then chrysanthemums and asters. Expert gardeners know which plants thrive in different seasons and conditions, and can plan accordingly to make sure their garden is healthy and beautiful all year long.
Many of you have already begun to weed your assessment plots, removing assessments that don’t give the most complete picture of your students’ strengths and needs (see our previous post). But in addition to weeding, we must also consider which assessments will help us teach students to thrive as readers, at different times across the school year and across their reading lives.
Your school may use a screener assessment, such as Acadience or iReady. Screeners can be helpful in giving some big-picture data across a lot of students, and as a starting place for thinking about adjustments to instruction. However, most teachers find they also need to administer diagnostic assessments to further inform their decision-making. These assessments are typically conducted one on one with students, meaning they provide a powerful opportunity for teachers to gather information about kids but can also take up a lot of time. This means we want to assess only as much as necessary to make sound instructional decisions, so we are not taking time away from other important parts of the day.
Consider how the following assessments fit with the students you currently serve:
You can think with your colleagues about planting these different kinds of assessments thoughtfully across your school year so that you are constantly getting the most useful information about your students. Here are two examples:
If we know which assessments are most important at certain times of the year, or within certain conditions, we can ensure that we are getting the most valuable information about students. And if we weed our assessments to ensure that only the most useful assessments are getting our time and attention, it leaves us much more time and energy to cultivate the other parts of our literacy day: read-aloud, play, differentiated small group work, and so on.
What’s on your mind as you begin to plan for next year’s assessment calendar? We’d love to hear from you!
What do you use to help when analyzing the writing about reading samples? The shifts make sense to me for the primary grades, but I'm still sorting through what I think about the assessments for readers who are more fluent and automatic decoders and are ready for deeper comprehension work.