Teacher Professional Development: I need the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System 1 & 2 so that I can learn to more accurately measure and track my students' reading progress.<profdevpilot>
I am a great reading teacher, but I could be a better reading teacher. Data is very important in guiding my instruction, but I need better reading data so that I can be a more effective reading teacher!
I have been teaching elementary special education for 8 years in high-poverty, urban elementary schools.
After six years of commuting, I am now fortunate to teach in the neighborhood where I grew-up and am raising my family. I am deeply committed to ensuring that the children of my community have the same quality education and opportunities that I have had. My greatest challenge as a special education teacher has been in gaining access to appropriate materials and professional development to help me meet the needs of my special learners. The general education literacy professional developments I have attended have been great, but mostly they leave me realizing that I need to learn better, more sensitive and accurate ways of tracking my students' reading progress so that I can modify my instruction to more rapidly meet their need. Time is short and using time effectively is critical if I am going to help my special learners meet today's rigorous literacy standards.
My Project
I am asking for the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System 1 & 2 so that I can learn to better assess my students' reading levels (approximately 1st grade through 5th grade). The assessment that I currently use (developed by the Columbia Teachers College) is very good, and provides me with useful data about my students' decoding, retell, and comprehension skills, but it is lacking in the sensitivity that I need at this point to up my game as a literacy teacher; while the scores do help demonstrate student growth, they don't always give me great data that informs me on what I need to focus my instruction on. The research I have done thus far leads me to believe that these Fountas & Pinnell assessment kits will help me use data in the new and powerful ways that I need in order to plan targeted, engaging literacy lessons that are aligned with the Common Core State Standards, which my state has adopted.
With these reading assessment kits, I will learn new, more sensitive ways of assessing my students' reading levels, including their areas of strength and deficit, so that I can plan literacy lessons that are more direct and targeted to meet their individual needs.
These tools will provide me with everything I need to learn to assess more accurately and to use the data effectively in my instruction.
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