When I started reading this chapter I was really discouraged, because it says in a "Healthy educational system" 80% to 85% of the students should be in the green and blue zones, 10% to 15% in the yellow zone, and 5% in the red zone. At the beginning of the year 27% of my kids were in the red zone for EasyCBM word reading, 39% were in the yellow zone, and 34% were in the green zone. This doesn't come anywhere close to the "Healthy educational system" standard of 80% to 85% on or above level. I recently did a progress monitor for word reading and was a little encouraged to find that now my red zone group is down to 15%. My yellow group is now 46%, and green zone is 39%.
My biggest frustration this year has been not having interventions for my red zone kids. Yellow zone kids recieve interventions through ECRI. I was glad to see my number of kids in the red zone decrease, but because I have so many students who are so low, I have not been able to teach to the top like I want. I feel like I constantly have to hold back to try to get the kids who at the bottom on board. It's not fair to the students who are at grade level and ready to learn.
I was encouraged as I read toward the end of the chapter where it talked about the growth that Riverview had in Kindergarten, and the first grade classroom had using ECRI. This is my first year teaching ECRI, so it's nice to see that the schools who have been using it have seen such great growth.
It is discouraging when other people use words that make our situations look grim. But we need to control the semantics related to our school system. We have wonderful kids with specific needs that we need to meet in order for them to succeed as well as students in "healthy" systems. So let's say we have a..."dynamic" system with "unlimited potential"!
ReplyDeleteI am curious about ECRI that many of the younger grade teachers are doing? Would love someone to just give a quick what it is and how it works. At the 6th grade level there really aren't any interventions that I have seen used yet or heard of but it is encouraging to see that something is happening with BM1 because I think each year kids go on without extra support it just gets harder and harder to bridge the gap, not impossible but much tougher. Hope ECRI continues to show results for kids!
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