End of Year Reflection

As the end of the year approaches it gets you thinking about how your students did this year. I was listening to NPR this morning (as I do every morning and I highly recommend doing so) and they were talking about all these education issues coming up such as holding teachers for accountable for student success. This got me thinking about how my students have grown and how I would be judged professionally. As I look at my students and where they started at with reading in math everyone made substantial growth. Then it made me think well what is substantial growth. What is expected growth for a student who came in a year behind. I can't even imagine how third grade teachers do it with some students coming to them at a 1st grade reading level. So my question to all of you is how do we reflect on student growth in a data driven way in this new philosophy of teachers being solely responsible for student academic success? Do we look at growth? Is there an expectation to get all students at grade level even when several start a year behind? And if we do reflect on ourselves professionally....what is appropriate growth for a student starting so far behind?

Grade Level Meetings, Curriculum, and Sped

A barrier we, as a special education team, have been struggling with is how to best collaborate with teachers/allign with curriculum content in our small group settings. This year we have been attempting to attend every 2nd and 4th grade level meeting to discuss curriculum and data. However, scheduling has proven to be a big issue (i.e., IEPs, evaulations, and feedback meetings). The sneek peek has been VERY useful for where exactly classrooms are for the given week of instruction. One struggle we are having is being able to identify when one of our students are low within a content area that we do not provide service. For example, we may see them for math instruction. But, their reading begins to dip in relationship to standards and reading is not on their IEP. Any brain storm ideas for communicating these areas of weakness when it may not be clearly identified on the IEP.

I know that communicating the area of struggle is the straightforward answer. But, frequently we do not hear about it....until the problem becomes significant.