Skills Iowa Implementation Meetings

If your school has not already had an implementation meeting to plan the use of Skills Iowa in the upcoming school year, you soon will. You have some great ideas that your fellow teachers and administrators should know. This is a great time to discuss how you have used Skills Iowa as well as to ask questions that you have about the programs we use in Skills Iowa.

If you have questions that can't be answered in your school, contact your project leader by clicking here. We at Skills Iowa are ready to help you find answers to your questions.

Your ideas are too good not to share. If you want to share them with those outside your building, please comment here on the Skills Iowa Blog. You will have to create an account before you can post, but you may already have an account.

We're looking forward to hearing from you, and your fellow teachers should hear from you as well.

Thanks for all you do.

Math Benchmark Assessment

You took the math benchmark assessments this year, but have you used the Compare Assessments report to see where there has been growth? This is a great report that shows you how your students have grown on the Essential Concepts and Skills. You can see the score of the entire assessment, the progress for individual classes as well as individual students and individual skills. This is the reason to take these assessments. If you need any help using this report, please contact your project leader.

Flash Player

There is a new version of Flash Player out, Version 10. You should not yet install this on your computers because it will cause problems with using Skills Tutor.

If you have already installed it, you will need to downgrade to Flash Player 9. Please consult your tech staff for help in doing this.

Don't wait

If you are wondering about a part of Skills Iowa that you haven't used, and are planning on using it next year, don't wait. Get started with it this year with a group of kids who you already know. This will help you get familiar with it for next year.

If you are using the benchmark assessments, but have not created and used your own assessments as well, try to create and use one over the concepts you are teaching right now. Your kids already know how to do their part, so why not reach out of your comfort zone just a little bit and start gathering more information about your students' achievement levels.

Some of our teachers use only one or other of the programs. While we are always happy to find usage of our programs, using one or the other of them in isolation will not lead to the same results as using both programs in conjunction. If you have not used Skills Tutor, and feel you need a little review, let your project leader know. Your project leader is going to be in your building soon for implementation meetings for the 2010-11 school year, and it would be easy to add a visit with you to the day.

Assess, Analyze, Act. This is our plan, and with the use of both of our programs, you can complete the process.

Using the Compare Assessments Report

By now, you've had the opportunity to take the first two of three Skills Iowa Math Benchmark Assessments and two each of each of the two types of Skills Iowa Reading Benchmark Assessments. It's a great time to use the Compare Assessments report to see if you are showing growth in the tested skills.

The first math assessment tested the students' incoming math performance; the second assessment shows us how students have progressed during this school year. If your students have not shown growth on skills that you have taught this year, it's not too late to hit those skills again. There are many Skill Resource activities and Skills Tutor activities that can help, but you the teacher are the most important resource available to your students. It's easy not to recognize where growth has happened because students test over skills when the skills are fresh in their minds. The benchmark assessments don't follow the timing of your instruction, and in that sense are a good real world test of the retention of these skills.

The reading comprehension assessments will not provide such a true skill for skill comparison in the Compare Assessments report, but they will still give you an idea of growth. If nothing else, they will put two assessments in front of you to make your own comparison. It's a great opportunity to see where reteaching needs to be done.

If you need help using the Compare Assessments Report, contact your project leader.

Snow Day Plans

This winter may be the worst that most of us can remember. Lots of lesson plans have had to be rewritten and rewritten again. The real question is what continuity problems are being created for our students, and what can we do about it? There is no one great solution, but hopefully, this entry might give you something to think about and to come up with even better ideas.

The first and easiest solution is to create a series of "No School Day Assignments". Let your kids know that they will be expected to work on these when there is no school. Include lessons in Skills Tutor that cover the concepts that you are covering in class. It might be best NOT to use the pretests. The pretests might not have your kids do the lessons that you are covering that week. Instead, you might choose the lessons that directly correspond with your week's planned concepts and skills. Take a survey in your class to find out who has a computer with internet access at home. This will give you an idea of how many of your students you can expect to complete the lessons.

You might also want to make up a "Snow Day Packet" of activities and work sheets that you can print out from Assessment Center's Skills Resources and Skills Tutor's worksheets. If you include lessons that you know always trip up your students, they can do extra work on those concepts and skills while they are at home. You might want to send these home in a sealed envelope with something like, "Open in the event of a snow day only!" on the front. Try to include a writing activity in this packet as well as just worksheets. The Parent Activities from Skill Resources would be a good idea to help those supervising the students on those days.

The benchmark assessments could also be given on these days. If you know that the forecast for the next day is for bad weather, you could send home the test code with the students. For those of you with websites, you could let the students know that the test codes will be posted on your website. If you have an email list for your students, you could email them instructions of what to do and include the test code in this email. If you know that some of your students do not have internet at home, you might want to print up the tests for them at the beginning of the winter months and send them home with them when it appears that the weather will make school cancellation the following day a possibility. Remember to enter these scores later for these students.

If you are having late starts, you are really losing instructional time. This would be a good opportunity to duplicate the benchmark assessments and send them home as homework. Having the students enter their scores individually when they next have computer time will take very little time, or you can enter them yourself very easily.

If you have already given the benchmark for the month, you might want to prepare an activity to help them with the most critical need reflected in the reports on that assessment. You might want to have them find the correct answers in the passage, or you might create an activity to help them make discoveries about main idea, inference, or any other skill tested in that passage.

These ideas are just starting points, but they may help you make a decision about using Skills Iowa to keep the momentum going in your classes in this incredible winter.

Remember, winter can't last forever, but it surely can seem like it will. Keep your spirits up and try to make the most of every day!

Using Skills Iowa's Reports

If you are giving Assessment Center assessments, you should be checking reports.

It's in the reports that you will find the areas in which your students are succeeding and in which they are struggling. Of course, we want to celebrate the successes, and we want to address the areas that cause our students difficulties.

In his address at the Iowa Association of School Boards, Mike Schmoker pointed out an example of a teacher in Flagstaff, AZ who raised student achievement in his building by having his students do three simple things over and over again: read, discuss and write.

We suggest that you print off the reading comprehension assessments you are giving. After consulting the reports to find the critical needs from this assessment, pass the assessment out to your students and use it again. One way to use it is to have your kids read the passage again and then search the passage for the correct answers. They can do this in teams or individually.

Another activity you might try is to break your class down into teams of twos and have them read the passage with a task in mind. For instance, if you see that your students are having difficulty picking out the main idea, you might have your students take the passage apart paragraph by paragraph writing one sentence that contains the idea that is expressed by that paragraph. If they are having trouble making inferences they could choose all of the events that lead up to a conclusion and all of the events that followed the conclusion and writing a paragraph that explains why things ended the way they did. You get the idea. There is no one way to use the passages in conjunction with the reports, but the key is that you use the reports to point you to a way to read, discuss and write.

Your project leader will be happy to come to your school to help you work with the reports, but the key is to look at them and make decisions on what help your students need. Just knowing that they are struggling with inference or main idea will not help your students. Just assessing your students on these concepts will not help either. Checking reports and planning your instruction around them will have an effect on achievement.