STAAR is over...now what!?

Before you bring out the wine and pop bottles in triumphant celebration of making it through the week of testing, put your glass down and step away from the spirits.

I know, I know...you worked hard all year teaching your students concepts,strategies, how to use their reference chart and graph paper. You've labored over training students on pacing themselves and processing through rigorous word problems. You've fought the endless battle of "show your thinking" and wrestled with them on how important knowing their facts is to their ability to work problems with fluency. All to face this handful of boring days of 'actively monitoring', secretly hoping and praying they've listened to you and applied all those lessons! As the testing days end, you're as exhausted and nervous as they are and you did nothing but read lines from a testing administrators book and move around the room to ensure students were on task.

You deserve a break, right? After all, the curriculum has been tested and you did all you could do! The end is nigh!! So what about these final 6 weeks of school? What are they for? Recuperation it seems. I don't mean to throw salt in your bubbly, but you might want to consider a few things before you propose a toast.

1. Assessments aren't the end all-be all:
As educators, our commitment is to just that, education. Education doesn't merely begin nor end with an assessment. Assessments are an on-going evaluation that measure progress and prepare us for the next phase of learning. An effective teacher typically pre-assesses their kids in hopes to reveal what needs to be taught in the concept. Quizzes often serve as a midpoint measuring tool both for the student and teacher. Immediately following the concept, the teacher gives an assessment to chart growth. And the cycle repeats for each concept. But in the next unit, the teacher revisits the concepts from the previous unit and a best practice is including concepts on the new test, that the students didn't master from the test before.

2. Instructional days imply instruction:
A school calendar has at least 180 instructional days built in. Testing generally occurs by what?...like the 150th day or so, of those instructional days? Leaving roughly 30 instructional days remaining. The operative word here is 'instructional'. This calendar sets our standard to instruct students for the totality of 180 days and as we commit to our profession of teaching. our goal should follow suit.

3. Teach the child, not the test
I've heard of districts supporting the ideal of  'teaching to the test', justifying their beliefs with the claims that teachers are assessed based on how students perform. But, in my mind, there are cracks in that line of thinking. A teachers' salary, first of all, is way too low for their performance and worth to be determined merely by some scores on a test. A true teacher is passionate about the growth and progress of their students. Yes, we may have a particular craving for one subject matter over others, but when you watch a true teacher in action...you see more than someone drilling and killing strategies. You see deeper things occurring than just small group and center based instruction. You see engagement because the teacher has built repor and respect amongst their students. You see buy in from students who have grown accustomed to the safe culture of a classroom environment, all set by the teacher. You witness students who have learned to trust that their teacher believes in them, wants the best for them, and won't give up on them. And from this, students will perform at their best. No test can assess these things.

Finally, know this...curriculum never ends. Student must be prepared for rigor, depth of thinking, processing skills, and application of concepts. Post-testing, is the perfect time to repetitiously embed these skills because they will be used as the child is exposed to higher concepts in the next grade level. Those 30 stress-free days remaining give you the flexibility to review, remediate and grind those concepts home in a creative way. Now imagine the student looking back in years to come and appreciating the fact that they can understand their current content simply because their teacher never

gave up teaching after the STAAR. This powerful act confirms that their teachers' job was never about some test, it was about the passion they have for their craft.

Now, I will drink to that!