Introduction

Welcome to what I hope to be a fruitful and ongoing conversation about literacy at our school. For now, the main purpose of this blog will be to update the community on what I am learning about our students' literate lives as well as what I'm learning about patterns across the school and research and ideas for supporting and nurturing our students' growth.

Today, just the basics.

Where can I find information?
The quickest (and most general) information is on the "Rosters" tab of our 2014-2015 UNMS Program doc. You'll notice that each student has a number in the column "RGL", which stands for Reading Grade Level. This is an estimate of each child's reading level in number-format. (TC levels are A through Z and correlation to grade-level is not always exact.)

For more detailed information, check out the Literacy Data '14-'15 doc which contains different views of grade-level information as well as narrative descriptions of each student's reading as ascertained through the Teachers College (TC) Reading and Writing Project running records assessment.

What does this information mean?
Data culled from the TC running records provides just one way we learn about our readers. As you may notice, in some instances, divergences exist between a student's TC reading level and ELA test score, for example. In addition to this data, humanities teachers have routine reading conferences throughout the year with students to learn valuable information about their reading lives, strengths, and weaknesses.

In short, this information is a starting place. A quick snapshot for our community to get a sense of how and how well our students are reading. This is not an objective science so we use all the information we can get to draw conclusions.

What can I do with this information?
Each of us can use this information to support our students with literacy. For starters, our work in professional development with Building Academic Language should have a direct impact on our students' reading. In each content area, we can use strategies to help students choose the right books, make sense of a math word problem, read a section in a history or science textbook, and build academic vocabulary, among other skills.

How I plan to use this blog
I would like to update everyone about once a week on individual students, patterns as a whole, and ideas I come across in various journals and books that are pertinent to this work. Please leave feedback, questions, or follow-up thoughts if you would like.

I will not auto-email the staff with posts. However, you may subscribe to posts either using a feed reader, such as Feedly, or by email.