Paul Bass Photo
Tamara Raiford and her colleagues vowed to have 90 percent of their first-graders reading at grade level by the middle of the school year. It didn’t happen. Now they have a new plan.
Raiford and her two fellow first-grade teachers at Davis Street 21st Century Magnet School set the goal last October. They shared ideas about how to improve their students’ reading in order to get there.
Then the mid-year results came in. Only 53 percent of the grade’s students made the “proficient” or “goal” levels on the tests, known as “DRAs” (for “Development Reading Assessments”).
Time for a plan B.
They reconvened one recent morning to plot their next move. They didn’t complain. They didn’t make excuses. They spent a half hour studying detailed breakdowns of their students’ test performance. Then they figured out which students need which kind of help to do better on the tests by year’s end.
Sometimes missing high goals can help teachers and students succeed, said Mary Durwin, a Davis administrator who helped the teachers analyze the data and put together a plan.
“You always need to look deeper” at the data, Durwin said. “It’s all about monitoring and adjusting instruction …
“When you don’t meet your goals, what is your plan? How are you going to meet your goals? The teachers are learning together.”
The deliberations of Davis’s first-grade teachers offered a view on some of the latest approaches to trying to close the racial achievement gap in public schools. Connecticut has the largest gap in the nation between the performance of black and white students on standardized tests.
Davis has closed the gap. Its black students perform as well as the statewide average for white students.
Davis’s successes led it to become a “Tier One” school in New Haven’s evolving, nationally watched school reform plan. (Click here for a series of Independent articles on how Davis has led the way in innovation.)
It got there in part by starting early with testing — and by being willing to fail and learn from mistakes.
Davis’s three first-grade teachers monitor how students perform on tests from week to week. Along with parents and administrators, they draw up individualized plans for each student.
Then as a group, the three teachers meet around a table in the “West Wing,” a sun-drenched section of the school’s temporary Legion Avenue home, to compare notes, analyze results, and discuss how to improve. (Click here for a story about last October’s strategy session.)
The other day the trio — Raiford, who began teaching this year as a second career after working as a paraprofessional; veteran teacher Chris Elmore (at right in photo); and Melissa Romero (at left), a mid-year permanent sub (the regular teacher got pregnant, took a leave, then decided to stay home for good with her child) — gathered with administrator Durwin and a couple of Davis instructional coaches.
Raiford brought in pages of printed charts with breakdowns of each student’s numbers on each part of the test. She came up with the idea of preparing these sheets earlier in the year. Elmore liked the idea and followed suit. “I came in with my friend Miss Raiford’s format,” she announced. “unfortunately, it’s not typed…”
The 53 percent result was a “reality check.”
“Our children were still having trouble with decoding” chunks of words, Raiford concluded.
It turned out different groups of kids had different decoding problems. Some were having trouble with beginnings of words, others the end.
Some fell short on “digraphs” — two-letter combinations like “gh” and “th” that make one sound. Others struggled with “blends”: two consonants, like “pl,” that merge into a combined sound.
Two classes fell below goal in a sub-category called “Affricates.” Those are two-letter combinations like “dr” in “drum.”
“Some kids think it’s a ‘j,’” Durwin observed.
Raiford said it presents a physical barrier for some first-graders who haven’t yet developed the muscle control to make that sound. “I tell them to put their finger on their throat to hear where the sound is coming from.”
The teachers then came up with clusters of students within their classes who had the lower scores in the same categories. They’ll break the classes into those groups for part of the day and have them work on those categories. Raiford also arranged for a high school tutor to come in for extra reading with six of her students; she prepared tailored reading for parents to do at home with their children.
Elmore, meanwhile, has agreed to offer extra reading instruction in Davis’s after-school program. Thirty first-graders signed up. Durwin added that students who end the year below goal will also be encouraged to attend Davis’s summer school.
In one of the three first-grade classrooms, 76 percent of the students did score above the goal. They, and high scorers in the other classrooms, are ready to work on a new set of reading skills, complex sounds that show up on a third-grade test. The first-grade teachers prepared to break them apart for those lessons, and to monitor their progress on a more advanced test.
Meanwhile, the kids falling behind will need more attention. Part of the challenge this year has been that Davis took in first-graders who went to a different school for kindergarten — where they didn’t take a “phonemic awareness” curriculum that develops their oral language skills. The kindergarteners learn that if you say “cat,” then substitute a “b” sound at the beginning, you say, “bat.” That meant they started behind the rest of the group and dragged down the scores.
That’s not an excuse to lower expectations, the teachers said. Part of the point of doing intensive data analysis as early as first grade is to prevent kids from falling behind before it really does become harder to bring them up to grade level.
So the teachers set a new goal. One took out a calculator. If each three more students in each class reach goal on the tests at the end of the school year, they can raise the average to 63 percent. If four do, they’ll reach 67 percent. Five, 73 percent.
They took a collective breath and decided on a new target: 75 percent.
In the higher-performing classroom, the goal remained at 90.
Stay tuned. We’ll return to see what happens.
