Well…we are one year further into STAAR…another year of mistakes and difficulties from the testing company…but WE MADE IT!
Y’all, I know that many of you are distraught over your kiddos’ scores. You worked hard. The kids worked hard. You learned. They learned. Together, you and your students grew as writers. You learned to love writing and everything about it.
And then last Wednesday you began to doubt yourself and your worth…all because the scores don’t reflect the amount of growth that you – the one who works with them everyday, who cried over their lack of skills at the beginning of the year, who STILL reminds Joe to capitalize his I or Missy to remember her punctuation – saw throughout the year.
That’s the problem. This test doesn’t measure growth. This test doesn’t know that at the beginning of the year 1/3 of your students were writing a 0. This test doesn’t know that you have kids who hated writing down to their core and refused to write when they walked through the doors in August but now writes 2-3 pages on every writing assignment. This test doesn’t know that 9/10 of your students had no clue where to start and stop a sentence and can now not only find where to use commas, apostrophes, and correct end marks, they can arrange their writing into coherent paragraphs.
We are hard on ourselves because we want our students to feel successful and because we put blood, sweat, and tears into our lessons. We provide differentiated instruction. We attempt to incorporate technology. We look at data…and more data…and more data. (So much we don’t EVER want to hear the word data ever again!) We adjust. We monitor. We pour our souls into every day with these kids.
And you know what? If you’re doing those things…if you’re teaching kids to find their love for writing…if you’re leading by example and showing students how much fun writing can be…you’re still winning! These kids won’t remember their scores on a test that is about as reasonable as my husband’s excuses for me not to visit the dollar section at Target.
They remember you. And they’ll remember you long after they leave you. You’re providing a foundation for a skill that they will need the rest of their lives…in some way or another. The chants, sayings, songs, dances, hand motions…all of those things you teach those kids will continue to shape the little voice in their heads as they write.
So cheer up! It’s not you! A lot of it is the test. There’s a reason that scores continue to go down every year. (69% passing in 2016, 63% passing in 2017, 61% passing in 2018) They want our kids to fail. They continue to increase the difficulty so that the scores go down.
Think about it…every year we get more and more knowledgeable…we try more strategies and hone our craft of teaching writing…yet every year the scores get worse? Something is fishy to me…
Anyway…
My scores actually increased this year over last year. And y’all…this was the most difficult group of students I’ve ever had. We changed some things here and there, but mostly we went back to basics. I thought I would share some of the things that worked for us.
If there is anything specific that you’d like to see me blog about during this series, please let me know in the comments. 
Until next time…
