nothin Reading Teachers Get On Same Google Page | New Haven Independent

Reading Teachers Get On Same Google Page

Aliyya SwabynPhoto

Reading teacher Tim Shortt.

Sabrina Breland’s Wexler-Grant teachers have managed to get more students reading at grade level — with 70 percent meeting their personal goals and 64 percent meeting the district benchmark — in part by using a Google Doc spreadsheet. Can that help schools citywide meet a challenge from the mayor?

Mayor Toni Harp recently issued the challenge to make New Haven The City That Reads,” by getting at least half of New Haven Public School students reading at or above grade level.

The Board of Ed plans to do that in part by streamlining student literacy. At its most recent board meeting, school district staff presented a system for monitoring younger students’ progress in reading, using simple online programs to keep teachers, administrators and parents in the know. Breland, of Wexler-Grant School in Dixwell, and other principals have refined that system this year, with promising results, the district reported.

Superintendent Garth Harries has stressed the importance of pushing kids to read by the end of first grade, which correlates with academic and career success in later grades. This year’s New Haven School Change initiative include plans to increase parental engagement, build a community focus on literacy development, intervene early for struggling students and improve mid-year literacy assessments.

At the end of first grade, if a student is not reading, the curriculum will accelerate away from them at that point,” Harries said.

Teachers of kindergarten through second grade now are expected to use Google Documents spreadsheets to keep monthly running records” for each student in their classroom, Elaine Parsons and Lynn Brantley said in the presentation to the board last week. The data can then be easily aggregated and shared to help keep the student on track.

The spreadsheet is a living document,” Brantley said. Every day, a teacher fills in one line of the spreadsheet for a different student, tracking each kid once per month so they have data points available over the course of the year. Factors tracked include a students’ reading accuracy, fluency, accuracy, ability to self-correct and method of understanding the text.

Before this system, teachers felt as though they were duplicating record keeping.” They had no streamlined system for storing the data, said Tim Shortt (pictured), a second-grade teacher at Worthington Hooker. Now it takes two to three minutes to actually” input that data, crucial especially for kindergarten teachers, who have a lot of data and testing they do,” Shortt said.

He told the Independent that he does not use Google Docs for his second graders, but does have a similar online system for his running records. Every K‑2 teacher should,” he said.

Not all schools work in the same way to track early grade reading, Harries said at the board meeting. We do have schools that do some different things. We do allow that, but we also monitor it really closely,” he said.

Mayor Harp said she hopes this will fit into her larger plan to get New Haven kids reading. We’re going to be paying some attention to your success at implementing this model,” she said.

Board President Carlos Torre said he was worried about the academization of kindergarten,” which leaves the kids little time to play. But Imma Canelli, deputy superintendent, said her staff has been looking at ways to instruct through play” at schools including at Wexler-Grant.

Melissa Bailey File Photo

The technology makes it easier for teachers to make sure each individual student is reaching his or her goals, said Principal Breland (pictured). It keeps the data neatly organized for the future.” Literacy teachers and staff also use an online system to create intervention plans for students consistently not meeting reading benchmarks. That system was more cumbersome last year,” Breland said. We spent more time inputting it than talking about the data.”

But now, school staff can focus more on the students. When parents want to know specific information about their children’s progress, the information is readily available,” Breland said.

The point is for everyone involved in tracking a student’s reading to be on the same page. We’re not going to have a surprise in June or a surprise in January,” Canelli said.

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