A few weeks ago, my students took their third quarter benchmark, a test covering all of the required state standards and intended to predict student results on the official state tests coming up in a little less than a month. I will not rehash my opinion on high stakes testing here. Rather, I want to discuss the feeling of validation that comes from a job well done, as well as my thoughts on the test results after a third year teaching English Language Arts, one of the most highly scrutinized subjects in education at large.

All students at my school took the 55 question test (ues, excessive) in the morning with most finishing before 11 and the rest some time in the early afternoon. The normed scores and projected proficiency scores come later but the raw percentage scores creamed positive progress. Our raw percentage scores across all three grades increased 5%, a huge jump in the standardized test world. After our instructional coach sent out that data, I pulled up my own students’ scores and started categorizing each score into “no change,” “decrease,” and “increase.” I could not categorize a handful of students who had no prior benchmark scores, for a variety of reasons, with which to compare third quarter. Apart from those, when I finished my initial analysis, I saw that I had 8-10 who had no change, 12-16 whose scores decreased and 49 who had increased! I entered the faculty meeting that afternoon on cloud nine.

Coming after nearly three years of work in the trenches figuring out how to teach ELA and how to teach it well, this feels like confirmation of a job well done and encouragement to keep going the way I have been going. Clearly, I have done something that works. All of the times I have fought to teach the kids where they are instead of idealistically or rather unrealistically, have finally paid off, at least as measured by this one-off, arbitrary measurement. FOr someone as hard on my own abilities as seen by the comparison trap, these scores provide much needed approbation.

When I first re-entered teaching, I knew nothing about how to teach ELA, even above the refresher course in the nuts and bolts of teaching. I struggled with translating the expectations of the state standards with the ability of the students in my classroom. I had to grapple with frustration that so many techniques I tried ended up failing. Many of my students come with a much lower reading and writing ability than I expected. I wanted so much for them to succeed and felt disappointed with myself when the majority low scores came back.

As the year progressed, I learned more about my students and their abilities, becoming more confident in my ability to differentiate the lessons according to their ability. That confidence and learning curve carried into the summer as I prepared to do better the following year. That summer and my second year at my current school, I reflected on what worked and what did not. I talked to my colleague who routinely has excellent classroom management, strong, positive relationships with the students, and stellar test scores. I took what I learned from her and started adapting and incorporating what I could into my own teaching.

I started year two determined to hold fast to my ideals of what is most important when it comes to reading and writing and how to bridge the gap to reach my students where they were. That led to moderate classroom success but enormous frustration with how those successes failed to translate to benchmark tests. I remember having several conversations with my colleague where I expressed this frustration with the arbitrary, poorly written benchmark questions that do not actually accurately measure students’ reading and writing ability. Towards the end of first semester I decided to stop fighting against the goads and do whatever it took to help my students succeed and succeed in a way measured by benchmarks and state testing.

This required detailed study of the tests themselves as well as my students scores on each of the questions. I took the test apart, first looking at the questions most missed. Did the question involve a multistep answer? Should the student select more than one answer? If yes, how many students selected at least one correct answer or only one answer? Did a significant number of missed questions align with a particular standard? Or the reverse, what questions did the students perform well on? As you can see, this sort of analysis takes time and effort. It also involves a bit of trial and error. Since I cannot see inside my students’ brains, I may erroneously hypothesize as to the cause for missed questions. Additionally, I, and all teachers like myself, are barred from seeing anything that even hints of a question on any state test. We must rely on assurances from others, who also have never seen actual state test questions, that the benchmark questions, which we can see, have been written to model the state test questions.

After I made that change and undertook that analysis, I had to wait until July and the state test score release to see whether my efforts had paid off. While still fairly low overall, my students’ scores showed improvement with their average scores more than doubling the school average from the previous year. I felt some affirmation from those results but still wanted more, not for me but for them.

I entered my third year as the newly-minted English department chair with two years experience with the benchmarks and my students under my belt. I knew what things had worked and where I needed to devote more time and effort. On top of that, I had two new, amazing content partners, a dream team, to work with. My experience, combined with the remarkable insight of my content partners led to more adjustments and modifications to the curriculum focused on helping the students in just the way I described previously. Each time we plan, we keep our students’ potential success in mind and ask ourselves if our focus will help them or distract them.

That brings me full circle to the third quarter benchmark. The results both affirm my, and my content partners’, efforts as well as motivate me to continue the hard work and effort because I want so much for my students to succeed, to continue to grow. It also motivates me to learn how to teach my students in a way that will matter on the test but more importantly in a way that will matter for their lives.