Lots of number crunching.... is this teaching?

As a part of my job as Title 1 interventionist, I am also serving as the Title 1 coordinator for the school. This is by no means an official job title. It's just that now I am assembling/writing the school's Targeted Assistance School Plan. Seems that the person who resigned and who I replaced had not really assembled this year's binder of plans, schedules, data, etc that make up this Plan. So now I'm working on it in addition to helping students. Overall I have to admit that I kind of enjoy the work. Not that I'd like to do just this all the time, but it's informative and a good counterpoint to the hands-on work with kids. I think it's good for educators to have some insight into the needs and responsibilities of administrators, kind of like I think everyone should hold at least one service job. Gives you perspective. I'm not an administrator, but working with some of this federal government paperwork does give me a broader perspective on the work I do in the classroom. I just wish more pencil pushers had a chance to see how their work impacts children. It's a good experience overall.

Working on reading and math interventions

Things have gotten underway in my new job. I'm doing small group interventions for reading and math at a rural charter school. The whole school is only about 55 or 60 kids, and my groups are all four or fewer students at a time. The challenge (for now) is streamlining my curriculum. I'm working with five different levels for reading, and using as many different programs! There's a fair amount of prep involved on the front end to get this all figured out, but I feel like I have something coherent and relevant for each group now. The littlest ones are using Touch Phonics to review and incorporate some remedial phonics skills. The next level is using a Sight Words and Syllabication system. The next two levels of intermediate students are reading short high interest nonfiction passages and being tested for comprehension. I think I'll soon be adding Dolch word drills to their work as well. And with the oldest students we're timing their reading speed on short passages, repeating three times per passage, and charting the results on nice little graphs. They seem pleased in spite of themselves to see the improvements they make each time.

This is all a great learning experience for me. I have to deal with such a huge age range (7 to 13) that my classroom management skills are tested daily. But I'm loving the challenge and as I get to know the kids I think I'm doing a better and better job. Tomorrow is an inservice day and they're sending me to a training for Renaissance Learning. I'm looking forward to it because their systems are widely used in our local districts and it will be good to know better how to use them, and because I think the Accelerated Math component could be useful for interventions. Plus it will be nice to sit and learn in that format for a day.

All in all it's going well.