5.16: Year-Long Achievement Data
After the AALT members finalize their presentations to the faculty, Bill makes a presentation and leads the discussion about year-long achievement data he has assembled and put into tables and graphs. Note that Bill is assisting the teachers to prepare for the data presentations they will make the following week. The data come from language arts assessments the school conducts 3 times per year-- beginning, middle, and end--as part of their Getting Results activities. Bill made similar presentations after each testing period, so this is the third time the AALT is looking at achievement for the entire school but the first time they are looking at achievement across the entire year for each grade, K to 5th. "The thing you're looking for," Bill tells the teachers, is "first and foremost, is there any indication of improvement in an area that we focused on?" He then asks the grade level teams to comment on what they notice in the data. We hear from the kindergarten and fifth-grade representatives.
Bill (GR cons) Let's take a look at the chart because I can just illustrate a couple of things. First of all, I heard it already, I think it was (?) who said, "Now it gets more confusing." It does, because previously, we had a space between each grade level because the end of the year results were not in there yet. Now that the end of the year results are in there, it looks like a whole string of bars and people have to focus a little bit to home in on just the beginning and middle for K or just middle and end in first grade, etc. .... OK? Here is what I like you to do, we don't have a lot of time, we've got maybe 15-20 minutes at most that we can spend on this right now. But, I'd like you to take just take a look at the results for your grade level. Just pan through the ones. I'm going to give you five minutes to do that and then we'll take maybe 5 minutes just to popcorn things that you notice specific to your grade level. OK? (Ts start looking; discussing) Bill Now, the one thing you're looking for, you guys, first and foremost, is Is there any indications of improvement in an area that we focused on? So if you spent a good proportion of your time in your grade level meetings working on a particular thing do we see any results in that particular area? (Ts look; discuss) Bill Let's have a quick go around. Sandy, Blaine, anything you noticed at K? Sandy Ummm.. yeah, I mean we were pretty we were really happy with the results. One thing we noticed was high frequency words, that's an area we can work on next year sooner. We didn't address it until kind of after mid-year when we saw what our results were mid-year, and I think that's an area next year we can aim to get higher. So ... that was one thing. And also we can tell here seeing the Santillana results for the first time, we're like wow, we can really improve in oral language, or we need to work on it, and it's not something we addressed at all during the year this is the first time seeing it, so that that's an area-- We were just talking about how the kindergarten classes really need that. We need to do more of it. (Bill calls on 5th grade rep) T 5th grade I think overall we've made many improvements many improvements overall. Umm... I would like to see next year work a lot on our conventions and improve it even more so. We took a little bit of a depth this time around from the beginning, middle, and end, it took a little bit of a dip, and I think we need to stay more focused on that and set structure and all that that we tied in with the conventions. Also I'd like to see, and we made an I think an outstanding improvement in our spelling. We have a lot more 5th graders spelling at the conventional level. So that's wonderful. And in the high frequency words, again a big improvement, we hit the 50% mark, but I think as 5th graders we need to go a little higher than that, I think we need to we need to go a lot higher that. They're going into middle school, and their expectations are going to be higher, so I think that as 5th grader teachers we need to focus on spelling. And even though we got 50%, we should high at this end of the game. Bill Good.