How End of the Year Data Prepares You for Beginning of the Year Success, Part One

We, building leaders/principals, often breathe a heavy sigh of relief as we end the school year. Being a school principal is no easy task, and its workload burden is never lost on me. I walked in those shoes for over 12 years and clearly remember the days winding down to the close of another school year. Though those days were relished for perhaps finding an opportunity to relax for two minutes, I knew what critical information was being revealed to me that would prepare me for a smooth beginning to the following year.

The information found within students’ end-of-the-year foundational reading assessments was the key to starting the following year off right and ensuring students who were struggling to read would be able to receive interventions as quickly as possible, often within the first week of school. After the end of year benchmark data is gathered, we should not “close the books” on the years reading achievement, instead we should be examining it, along with our teachers, to determine our course for the following year.

Here is a procedure you might consider:

Begin by looking at overall instructional levels on the foundational reading assessment for each grade level in your school. Your assessment may provide you with the percentage of students at each grade level. You want to ensure that you equate this percentage to the number of students who will be needing an intervention.

For many schools, the number of students needing a Tier 3 intervention may seem daunting, but it is our obligation to ensure that our most struggling readers are our top priority. Many principals feel that it seems that they do not have an adequate number of specialized teachers and therefore cannot provide services for all students that may need help. Looking at the situation differently may provide you with a new perspective. Here are some steps to take to assess.

First, identify the number of students in need of an intensive intervention for each grade level. In Kindergarten through second grade, we recommend groups of 4 to 5 students, in grades 3 through 5th or 6th grade, group sizes of seven can easily be manageable. This will provide you with the number of sections of intervention needed within each grade level.

Once you have determined the sections of interventions needed, you can then determine the number of personnel available to teach the interventions. When determining the personnel available to teach the interventions, keep in mind the number of minutes for the interventions that needs to be provided. Students in Kindergarten need much less time –we recommend 25 minutes, than students in third through fifth grades, who likely will need 45 minutes of intervention.

Note that in the majority of schools in which we engage with, school leaders think that there are not enough personnel available. When we use follow the steps outlined here (and supported at Keys by our “Intervention Calculator”), one is able to determine the number of personnel and the number of total minutes throughout the day they are available to provide interventions. Compare the number of minutes needed for intervention to the number of minutes available by providers. In the majority of schools, the number of minutes needed to provide intervention exceeds the number of minutes needed for intervention. And, to complicate things a bit more, it’s also likely, that these providers are busy every day at the same time of day. In other words, if you have a literacy block that is held within the same time of day for the entire school, your personnel available to provide reading interventions are bottled up during this literacy block. This becomes a master scheduling problem, not a personnel problem.

So that students receive the interventions that they need, weI recommend creating a staggered schedule to provide literacy instruction. Having a staggered schedule to your literacy block ensures a more efficient system for managing personnel and allows all students who need an intervention to receive an intervention. As an example, interventions offered at opposite times of the day for various grade levels ensure that no student is removed from universal instruction or Teir 1 instruction. Fifth grade receives interventions while first grade receives whole group instruction, and first grade receives interventions while fifth grade receives whole group instruction. And so on.

Once students have been identified who will need an intervention for the following year, it is time to determine what intervention they will need. Working with your intervention providers and your assessment data, make a list of students for each grade level and the intervention that they need. If known, indicate the provider who will be giving the intervention.

By conducting the procedures outlined above, students will be ready to receive their intervention within the first days of school. Yes, students may grow academically over the summer, or students may slide over the summer, but they will be the exception, not the norm. Small adjustments may need to be made to groupings when school begins.
Students who struggle to read should be our top priority and every minute counts. Let us use our end-of-year data to ensure success at the beginning of the year for our students.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, How End of Year Data Prepares Us for Beginning of Year Success—What Do Our Teachers Need?