How did you determine the effectiveness of your intervention?
The initial results from the survey indicated that high school teachers and college instructors are unclear on the difference between college-ready reading and college-level reading. We can infer from the comments that part of the reason might be the lack of collaboration between high schools and colleges, but another contributor could be the “silo” attitude that our educational institute often, unintentionally, encourages. These mixed results confirmed the need to move forward with these collaborative conversations in order to find clarity for teachers and students. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the survey and the discussion protocol should be measured by the classroom impact, and this is the area we realized should be included in our intervention. Once teachers arrive at a shared definition of college-ready and college-level reading, then what?
That is the question we attempt to answer through our unpacking the standards strategy. The effectiveness of this activity should be measured through the learning targets, the activities, and the formative assessments that teachers create based on deeply examining each reading standard. If students begin to show improvement in critical reading skills, and teachers can determine their students’ success toward mastering the reading skills demanded by the state standards, then those students should be college-ready as evidenced by their success on the Smarter Balanced Assessment given in the junior year of high school. Those students who need more time to become college-ready will have their senior year to continue honing their reading skills until they demonstrate proficiency through formative and/or summative assessments based on the standards.
