Like many schools, we give our kids internal assessments a few times a year to track their growth, inform our teaching, and communicate progress with families. In reading, we use the
STEP assessment which is similar to a DRA or F&P test, while in math, we use our own internally created assessments based off our standards. Since these assessments are given 1-1 or in small groups, we give them slowly over two weeks while continuing with our regular teaching. As we finish with each student, we enter these results in fancy spreadsheets. The documents do relatively snazzy things like change the cell color based on how much kids are learning and spit out stats about the average reading level or the amount of growth a class is making.
These stats are really useful and crunching these numbers makes us better able to teach our kids. But we really, really believe that kids are more than numbers and we shouldn't only be talking about student progress by using Microsoft Excel. To make sure that this sentiment stays squarely in front of us, we send out all staff emails throughout our testing window celebrating students who have made awesome progress. What is great about our staff and these emails is that we know we work in the real world with real kids and that means not all of our kids will be above grade level. That's ok and our teachers are equally excited about students who made great progress, but for one reason or another are below grade level as they are about students scoring way above their grade.
Below the fold are some of these teacher emails from this last round of testing, lightly edited for clarity and with student names removed for privacy. I've also added some background on STEP levels where relevant.
