New Year, New Goals: Using Data to Reset and Plan for 2025

Jan 6

New Year, New Goals: Using Data to Reset and Plan for 2025

What’s the most important question we can ask ourselves as teachers and reading specialists and coaches? That’s easy: How do we teach reading in a way so that we can reach every student and every need? The answer may not be what you think! It all starts with assessments. Analyzing data we get from assessments can completely transform our reading instruction and help us reach every student. Today, we’re doing a deep dive into assessments and why we need them to drive our reading instruction.

Good Reading Instruction: The Five Pillars

There are five pillars that make up good reading instruction. Each one of these pillars are important, but in the younger grades, we must start at phonemic awareness (helps students understand and manipulate sounds for decoding later on) and phonics (focuses on the relationship between these sounds and the letters that represent them).
After phonemic awareness and phonics are solid, we can introduce higher-order thinking skills like fluency and comprehension. Students are much more successful with these later pillars if the foundations are set first.
Here are the five pillars are good reading instruction:

Phonemic awareness
Phonics
Vocabulary
Fluency
Comprehension

Good Reading Instruction: Two Models

There are two models that should be guiding our instruction that show us how these five pillars come together. These models help guide teaching and shape how to assess student needs.

The Simple View of Reading (a “bird’s eye” view of reading)

Breaks reading into two components:

Decoding - understanding connection between letters and sounds.
Language comprehension- understanding the meaning of what they've read.

Scarborough’s Rope (a “zoomed-in” view of reading)

Shows how multiple strands (fluency, word recognition, background knowledge, etc. ) of both word recognition and language comprehension work to support these two skills.

Let’s break down these “strands” of the rope for better understanding.
Students need a robust foundation in oral language in order to identify the sounds of speech. If we neglect these pillars, we hinder their reading journey. Students must master each stage with explicit instruction in order to become fluent and confident readers.

Phonological Awareness - Syllables, onset-rime, rhyming.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate these sounds in spoken word. Students need to be able to segment and blend so that when they learn letter sounds, they can decode them.
Phonics bridges the gap between sounds and corresponding letters. This helps students decode and encode.
The more they work with decoding through practice and repetition, the more they build automaticity. When they can decode automatically, it frees up the cognitive load so that they can comprehend what they’re reading.
As students become more automatic, they develop…
Fluency! Fluency is the ability to read with appropriate speed and accuracy.
When these aspects are all in place, we can take the language comprehension piece and give them something to hang on to since fluency paves the way for comprehension.
Students can use the background knowledge, vocabulary, etc. and can begin making inferences and engage with the text which makes them successful readers.

Three Main Types of Assessments

As we build readers, we are balancing decoding and language comprehension and tailoring instruction to meet student needs. How do we know which needs to meet? Enter: targeted assessments!
Assessments are essential for effective teaching. No matter what’s being assessed, assessments provide a roadmap and tell us where students are, what skills they need to develop next, and how we can adjust instruction.
We rely on three main types of assessments to be our roadmaps:

Screeners:

These are brief and are given to all students at the beginning of the year, middle, and end. When we use these universal screeners, it gives us patterns about students and it also helps us see trends in classrooms and Tier 1 instruction.
Screeners give an overview of which students are on track and which might be struggling.
These screeners are essential because it allows teachers and specialists to identify students who need early-on support.
When this screener identifies a student that might need support, we move onto diagnostic assessments.

Diagnostic assessments:

These assessments are more in-depth and tell us why a student is struggling. They give us a bigger picture and more detail of knowledge or skills that may be missing.
A student that struggles with decoding might show deficits in phonemic awareness or in blending words - and a diagnostic spelling or decoding assessment would tell us this.
This information shows us what instruction we need to give students in order to meet their needs.
When we give a diagnostic assessment, a student’s reading struggle is revealed, so we can create a plan to support them in these struggles.

Progress monitoring:

Once we know how to support these students, progress monitoring keeps track of the growth and helps us adjust our instruction where needed.
Progress monitoring involves regularly assessing students. Are they making growth in the areas they were initially struggling with?
This type of assessments are on-going and help us adjust our instruction and needs to be responsive to student needs.

Example Scenario

Let’s set up an example scenario for you so that you can see how this would play out in a real classroom.

A first grade student who doesn't meet the benchmark at the end of 1st grade for oral reading fluency.
You might consider:

A nonsense word fluency assessment to check their blending skills and see if he or she has mastered the phoneme-grapheme relationship.
An assessment where the student blends real words to see what they have mastered and what skills they’re struggling with.
A spelling screener, which strongly indicates a students’ phonics knowledge.

If the student does well on these tests, it’s possible they need to build fluency by learning to scoop sentences or read in phrases.
If the student does not perform well on these assessments, we need to take a step back and help him or her build that automaticity and meet them where they are.

That’s a Wrap

Assessments help us make informed decisions and guide our instruction.
When we have the correct data, we have a clear path that helps us identify gaps.
The goal is not to collect data, but to use data to make informed decisions so each child can succeed.
Think about it for your own classroom: How can these assessments help you identify the root cause of struggle and how can you use it to support your students?

January Route2Reading Coaching Call

Assessments are exactly what we will be diving into during the Route2Reading coaching call in January!
I’ll be reviewing real data from members and providing real-time advice and feedback to help analyze your data so that you can take actionable steps within your classroom.
If you’re already a member, we can’t wait for you to join us for this call!
Interested in getting your data reviewed but aren’t a Route2Reading member?

Join us and become a member of Route2Reading!
By joining this membership, you’ll get:

Resources:

You’ll get access to all of the resources I’ve created.
This includes exclusive resources just for members like lesson plans, instructional videos, and monthly coaching calls