Mesmer and Mesmer on RTI and testing

While reading Mesmer on RTI, I can see that students are given a variety of tests from grades K-3. These universal literacy practices can be tied to federal funding and assess the student at least initially on speed, word identification, and phoneme awareness. Using this testing and running records, the teacher can begins to get an idea of the students' accuracy. "If the benchmark score does not meet the grade-level minimum, then additional diagnostics are administered and collected."(Mesmer, p. 284) Response to Intervention is a great way to get special education students the help they need while the assessments are being administered, instead of "admiring the student's reading problem-discussing the problem, and collecting data on it months before they can do anything about it " (Mesmer, p. 289) as in the current discrepancy model. I can see two points of worry here. First, is what about ELL students who may even after exiting ELL not perform well on standardized testing, are we pushing them into special education when they need the syntax and word meaning backgrounds to increase their comprehension? Also, I worry about the lack of acceptable testing for reading comprehension and too much reliance on standardized testing with too little time for informal assessments. Routman says that "we need to make sure we are documenting student's progress at the classroom and school level. We must balance formal assessments with informal assessments." (Routman, p. 111) It is a fine balance to have to walk between the meeting the needs of our students and assessing them as the state, fed and districts tell us to. RTI provides another way to help our students sooner than later, and that is probably a good thing.

Here is the link to Kristen's blog at http://kristen-bringonthebooks.blogspot.com/.
I found Kristen's questions on how RTI can help older students in middle school and high school to be thought provoking.

On learning to make messes

When reading Lamott and thinking about writing, I can't help drawing parallels to making visual art. In teaching elementary students art, I have often run into the fear of messy. You might think this would only happen with 4-6 graders, but I have seen this as early as kindergarten and through out all of K-6 over the years. Some students just don't like to get messy. Give them an open ended project with plenty of creative choices and they are likely to break down in tears. For some, the messier the project the worse this becomes, paper mache is a great example. I think we all like to have parameters in our life, especially in our schooling. Tell me what you want and I will do that. Is that what you wanted, Mrs. Byrne? If we truly create our own idea and go with it, what is the worst that might happen? We might make a mistake. Now, we get to the real dilemma. Lamott says, "Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess shows us life is being lived."(pg 28) I have had many times in my life where I felt if only the clutter was all straightened out, that life would somehow get much better. I have never found it to be true. My piles of books, notebooks of ideas, paintings, postcards and pictures all over the wall of my studio, inspire me every day. Students need this kind of inspiration too. Lots of books to read, pictures on the walls, magazines and art work on the walls. Maps and atlas and globes nearby. They need fertile ground in which to create. Lamott tells us the Kurt Vonnegut said, " When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth." She says, " So go ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Use up lots of paper. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend...as children we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here, and by extension, what we're supposed to be writing."(pg.32) I think Lamott is on to something here. We need to create a space for students to feel comfortable enough to make messes and risk mistakes.