Doug Stone has written admirably on the assessment and curriculum development pieces as they relate to input based methods. We really need to keep in the forefront of this blog the discussion about data, especially. Wwe really need to be careful.
Data can carry a lot of misinformation. It is not easy to understand and even one general discussion on the topic would be filled with so many myriad variables that an administrator would be completely fooled and misled by the numbers. Numbers fool.
A child received the following note, dutifully filled out by the teacher. This is verbatim:
Bear – 90.6%
Dibels – 110 (target is 90)
Mondo Oral Language 14 (target is 15)
DRA2 – 28 (target is 28)
I don’t know what that means. To riff on Le Petit Prince, if I were the parent, I would rather hear the teacher tell me how much this child’s eyes sparkle during story hour, how beautiful he sings, how he is kind to others. Only then would I know if he was doing well in school.