At the beginning of the year, all language arts teachers use the Benchmark Assessment to find out what reading level each of their students are at. The Benchmark Assessment is awesome because it gives the teacher a letter of the reading level each student is at. Teachers use the letters of each student in their classroom to form homogeneous guided reading groups so that each student is getting reading instruction at their highest instructional reading level. We have a book room that is leveled using the same Fountas and Pinnell leveling system. To see our book room, click here: Book Room Posts. For our reading interventions, we use LLI, which is also aligned with the Benchmark Assessment. It is so nice to teach in a place where our assessment, universal instruction, and interventions all align by reading level. As teachers, that means we are not constantly wasting our time figuring out how one reading assessment measures up to another.
Once all students have been benchmarked, we put up our data wall. This year, language arts teachers filled out a card for each student with their student ID numbers, benchmark score for the fall, and put stickers on cards to indicate any circumstances of that student beyond the norm. A parent volunteer put up all of the cards, so this year’s data wall is already up and running. It’s a great visual for all staff to see where our school’s data is. Below are a few pictures of our data wall:
Here is an overall look of our whole data wall. We keep it in the hallway of our teacher’s lounge so that students can’t see it, but all of our staff can.
Here are two different views of the data wall a little bit closer up.
The key shows how to read the data wall. Each colored square represents a different grade level. Each different colored sticker represents something different such as a student has had a reading intervention, is in Special Education, is labeled Gifted and Talented, and/or is an English Language Learner.
A data wall is a great way for everyone to visualize where our school is at as far as student reading levels.
