Section 1: Academic Achievement - National Center for School ...

When parent/teacher conferences rolled around at the beginning of March, I was a little
worried. I knew I was going to have some tough conversations with a few parents about lack
of motivation and effort. While there are always students who have motivation issues, I was
now seeing trouble with students who would not have these issues had the school not been
involved with the Reading First grant. In most cases the parents were first to bring the topic
up. They were having some of the same issues at home. Students who normally wanted to go
to school were complaining about having to come. There were new battles over getting
homework done that had not been which had not occurred in years past. I knew some of the
parents had legitimate concerns because by the nature of my job I work with students for
more than one year. I had seen the same changes. I think the two most difficult conferences
were with two of the first grade parents. They were very concerned about the dramatic
change that had occurred in their child’s attitude towards school during the school year. It
broke my heart to hear them tell me how excited they were to go to school in preschool and
kindergarten and how that excitement had diminished over the year and by Spring it was a
daily battle to get them to come to school.
By April, I was totally frustrated and wanted to quit. When these frustrations were expressed
on a school wide level, we were told to hold the course and wait for end of the year testing
results. I was disappointed in my performance as a teacher and frustrated with the limited
instructional strategies available to me. I think even worse, I felt I was letting my students
down because I was capable of better, but honestly I was so emotionally drained from
plowing through the curriculum, battling attitudes, lack of student motivation and engagement
that I had very little energy left to focus on adjusting the strategies I could.
Results
As the year came to a close I was completely discouraged. We then started to complete our
end of the year testing. Our 3 rd grade state reading assessment results arrived. Our students
scored the highest ever in the 10 years we’ve been giving the assessment. We even beat the
state average. Although this was excellent news, I wanted to analyze some building level
data. One of the assessments we use is DIBELS. It is a reading assessment that is
administered to students individually three times a year. It was developed by the University
of Oregon. (More information is available through their website http://dibels.uoregeon.edu.)
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