How to Plan Your Test Prep Around What Content Matters Most [episode 121]

Emily  0:36

Hey there. Thanks for joining us today. In today’s episode, we’re helping you make the most of your test review time and sharing a teacher approved tip for teaching test skills.

Heidi  0:47

We start our episodes with a morning message just like we used to do at morning meeting in our classrooms. This week’s morning message is a fun one. It is think at the last show you watched your new profession is the main characters job in that show. So Emily, what is your new job?

Emily  1:05

My new job is an obituary writer.

Heidi  1:09

Do you happen to see the ghosts of the people you’re writing obituaries for?

Emily  1:12

I guess we’ll find out the new job. I just got it today. Very exciting. What’s your new job?

Heidi  1:18

Well as a surprise to everyone including me I am now Vicar of a quirky English Village.

Emily  1:26

And I would say the name of the show but I bet you most of our listeners have not heard.

Heidi  1:31

Vicar of Dibley needs more love.

Emily  1:32

It’s a good one and so is Dead to Me. No, and so is Not Dead Yet.

Emily  1:39

We got a kick out of these responses. Stacy, Elizabeth and Shani are all now drug lords. Grizelda was very popular. Catherine is a pirate captain, Danielle is a Texas Ranger.

Heidi  1:53

Move over to Chuck Norris.

Emily  1:55

Shelly is running a haunted Bed and Breakfast. Gail says police detective no thanks that feels like teaching middle schoolers.

Heidi  2:04

Probably true.

Emily  2:05

April is a miracle worker. Jennifer is Queen of England. And we have several new firefighters detective spies and doctors busy people. There’s a lot of shows with those. And Donna is a chef. Hillary is an assistant to the editor in chief for Mode magazine. Appreciate this call back to Ugly Betty love that show. So good. Abby is a seven year old blue healer. And I think she might have won this game. That’s a fun job. I’d like to have the job of being Bluey. And lots of teachers ended up back as teachers because they just watched Abbott Elementary.

Emily  2:40

We’d love to know your new TV based profession come join the conversation in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Heidi  2:46

Even though there is still a fourth of the school year left, we are right in the middle of everyone’s favorite season or least favorite season testing season.

Emily  2:57

Our motto here at the teacher approved podcast is to elevate what matters and to simplify the rest. And that’s what we want to help you do with your test prep.

Heidi  3:07

Now administrators and you know the people outside your classroom often send the message that there isn’t anything unimportant when it comes to the curriculum. And in one sense that is true. The standards are in the curriculum for a reason. Because as teachers, we usually only have a scope for this one year, we don’t necessarily have the big picture of how understanding is built strand by strand across several grades. So it is important that we cover the core.

Emily  3:37

But even though everything in the curriculum is important, it doesn’t mean that everything is equally important, right? Not every standard can be your top priority. There’s just not enough time to review using a glossary with the same energy that you’re giving to remembering key details in the text.

Heidi  3:56

When test prep rolls around, we need to make some big decisions about which standards are worthy of our limited time and energy. So we are dedicating this episode to helping you figure out which parts of your curriculum need the most focused review, and which parts can maybe just be lovingly mentioned briefly in passing.

Emily  4:18

In our district that we used to teach in, we called our most important standards our a big rocks. I think a lot of people are familiar with this metaphor, but in case it’s new to someone help us visualize that, Heidi.

Heidi  4:29

Of course. So imagine you have a jar and a pile of rocks. You scoop up the rocks and put them in a jar and they just don’t fit. The jar is just too small. And in this rock jar situation, you absolutely cannot get a bigger jar. So what do you do? The solution is to put the biggest rocks in first and then the smaller rocks can fit into the spaces between the big rocks and then voila, everything fits into the jar.

Emily  4:55

I don’t know if time actually functions like rocks in a jar but if you It was true, even if it isn’t exactly true.

Heidi  5:02

So sticking with the analogy, what are the big rocks of your curriculum?

Emily  5:08

So the first step to identifying those big rocks is figuring out what your students need to know. The best place to start is to find out what is covered on the test. If you’ve seen the test in previous years, that can give you a good idea of which standards are featured more heavily in the questions.

Heidi  5:25

Another resource that I use a lot is a site called Achieve the Core. As they point out on their site, not all content in a given grade is emphasized equally in the standards. Some clusters require greater emphasis than others, based on the depth of the ideas, the time they take to master and or their importance to future mathematics.

Emily  5:49

For each grade level Achieve the Core has focused documents that list the math standards and rank it as either a major cluster, a supporting cluster or an additional cluster. This can be super helpful at test prep time, because you can go down the list and see which of your standards deserve the most attention.

Heidi  6:07

This can be kind of hard to visualize if you haven’t seen it before. So let me give you an example.

Heidi  6:12

So for third grade, it shows that multiply and divide within 100 is a major cluster. And so is solve problems involving the four operations. And if you’re someone who teaches third grade, I’m sure that that makes a lot of sense to you.

Heidi  6:27

But I was surprised to see that use place value understanding and properties of operations to perform multi digit arithmetic is considered an additional cluster. It doesn’t even qualify as a supporting cluster. So yes, we want our third graders to be able to do that. We are not going to spend a week reviewing properties, it’s just not a wise use of time.

Emily  6:49

I love this resource, so helpful to help teachers narrow in on what standards really deserve the most attention.

Heidi  6:56

And even if you teach in a state that doesn’t use the common core standards, these focus documents are still actually really useful. I have found that there really isn’t a huge variation between the different state cores for the same grades. So even if the focus doesn’t align perfectly with your core, it will still give you some really great insight about which standards deserve the most attention.

Emily  7:21

These documents are kind of hard to find on the Achieve the Core website. So if you want to reference your grade level easily look for mathematics focus by grade level on the website, or you can go to the link in the show notes and we’ll take you right to it.

Heidi  7:36

Now, unfortunately Achieve the Core doesn’t have focused documents for language arts, or science standards. And I have really searched but I haven’t been able to find anything similar on those subjects.

Emily  7:49

Darn it.

Heidi  7:50

I know. It would be so handy. But if you know of something, will you please let us know and we will be sure to pass it on to our listeners.

Emily  7:57

Your best bet for ELA and science is to refer to released questions, or your students test scores from past years. This can give you a sense of not only which standards get the most questions, but how those questions are phrased.

Heidi  8:12

For ELA it is probably a safe bet that they will be lots of questions about reading comprehension. If you teach younger students, there will probably be a lot of phonics questions and you’re going to find vocabulary in every grade.

Emily  8:27

Another resource that might help you identify the big rocks of your core is our spiral review morning work. We organized our pages so that the most important standards are being covered most frequently. That’s why we give second graders a daily placed value question and third graders a daily multiplication question, but they only have a telling time question once a week.

Heidi  8:49

And language arts was trickier to plan because we didn’t have that focus document, but we gave the standards that impact other standards the most weight. So grammar is covered every day as well as phonics and spelling. We have a lot of vocabulary questions. But we don’t have as many questions about figurative language, shades of meaning or dictionary skills.

Emily  9:10

Yet, dictionary skills definitely fall into the little rocks category. Morning work can also help you figure out where to focus your test review by helping you spot where your students are struggling.

Heidi  9:22

This is such a valuable gift of daily morning work. If I can see my second graders are struggling every time a money question shows up in the morning work that lets me know that my kids need extra support with reviewing money.

Emily  9:35

But the opposite of that is also true. If I see that most of my students are confident with money problems or fractions or grammar. That tells me that it’s not worth spending a lot of review time on those topics. Maybe I want to do some small group work with my kids who are still struggling. But planning a bunch of money review activities for the whole class is probably a waste of time. When we could be reviewing story problems because you know, they always struggle with story problems.

Heidi  10:03

They do always struggle with story problems.

Emily  10:05

And they’re the worst.

Heidi  10:07

And that is why each of our morning work pages includes a daily story problem. It’s almost like we put a crazy amount of thought into how we structured our pages.

Emily  10:16

And wrote oh, so many story problems.

Heidi  10:19

So many, I probably could be in the Guinness World Records for most story problems written.

Emily  10:25

Ay an individual. Sure, yeah, our own bank of questions. If you haven’t used our morning work with your class before, or if you’ve gotten out of the habit, it’s not too late to start now. Spiral review is so beneficial anytime, especially before testing.

Heidi  10:41

If you are interested in supporting work, we have a two week free sample that you can sign up for. We will put the link to our morning work and that sample in the show notes so you can find exactly what you need.

Emily  10:52

Once you’ve identified the big rocks of your curriculum, you have a pretty good sense of which topics should get most of your review time. But you might also want the input of the people most impacted by your testing.

Heidi  11:00

And no, we don’t mean your admin. We are talking about your students. Consider asking your students how they feel about the topics you’ve taught this year. You could have an open ended question like which math topics are you confident with? Which ones are you still learning? Or you could give students a list of your standards and have them rank themselves in proficiency.

Emily  11:24

Yeah, you could do something like a one through 10 scale or have them circle the emoji face that matches how they feel about their understanding of that topic. If a lot of kids are feeling shaky about measurement that can help you know, it’s worthwhile to spend some time on that standard, even if you feel like they’re doing pretty well.

Heidi  11:40

So as you’re scheduling your test prep, remember, you don’t have time to focus on every standard equally. Make your review time effective by identifying which standards matter most. And then find the holes in your students understanding so you know, you’re putting an effort where it will have the biggest impact.

Emily  11:58

We’d love to hear how you decide what to review for end of year testing. Come join the conversation in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Heidi  12:08

We are trying out a new segment here on the podcast. We tried it out a couple weeks ago. So this is a guess is our second run. Each week, we’re shining a spotlight on a procedure and sharing our tips for how to better implement that procedure in your classroom.

Emily  12:22

We have a procedure resource that looks at 26 essential classroom procedures and offers so many guiding questions to help teachers think through all the nitty gritty details they need to consider for their own classrooms. Heidi and I have each chosen one of the questions to talk about. Hopefully, as you hear our ideas, it will get the wheels turning for what you want to see happening in your own class. This week, we’re looking at procedures for classroom routines. So which question did you want to discuss Heidi?

Heidi  12:52

So I picked the question, if a student is absent, how will they get the work they missed? And that may be seems like a strange question to be doing at this point in the year. And you’d like you do have to figure that out for your students that are regularly absent. But it takes on a special twist during test review season. Because you need to figure out what happens if a student misses an important test review.

Heidi  13:18

So you need to have a plan for how you can make sure that those students are still able to review the content and that I don’t know that I have a winning suggestion. Because that might take some extra thought on your part. One suggestion I have is maybe you could forego your regular small groups in favor of a small review group. And so you’re just pulling the kids that need to be working on that topic.

Heidi  13:42

Or you could work as a team and have one teacher take all of the kids that need to review fractions, for example. And then you split that teacher’s class among the other teachers in your team and you all play math games, but the kids that need more enrichment than they do review.

Heidi  13:58

And then you also have to figure out what happens if a kid actually misses testing. There are probably some really like strict protocols around that. Yep. So make sure that if you know you’re new to this test, or new to the school or new to this grade, you have that answered before you get into the hot water of all the testing protocols. So much fun. So Emily, which routine question did you pick?

Emily  14:20

Well, I picked what will you do for birthdays. Now again, this is another one that you’re probably like, it’s a little late. But you could think about how it’s working so far for you this year and what you might want to change for next year.

Emily  14:34

So for birthdays, I just like to give the students a small gift so I would batch prepare their gifts before the school year started. And obviously I included extras since we might get new students mid year and I like to keep it small too like a bargain paperback book from the book orders. So you might want to be looking at that now if you want to order those for next year or you could do a fun pencil or pen or something like that.

Emily  15:00

This year, my daughter’s teacher did those multicolored pens with different colors that you can click she loved that had cute little tag on it. And then you need to decide if you want to do any other kinds of celebrations in your classrooms for birthdays. It probably depends on the grade, I felt like in second grade, we didn’t have to go too over the top with birthdays, just a small class acknowledgement was enough. But there are a lot of different things you can do.

Heidi  15:25

This is a great time of year to figure that out. So you can get ahead for next year. And I’ve also noticed that like, as May and June rolled around a lot of stores will have sales on things that are meant to occupy kids during the summer, like in the Target spot, or even craft stores. And their kind of like kid activity sections. Yeah, they’ll have sales on things. So you could get a whole class set of like, a fun little craft or something at a really good price, if you’re on top of it enough to get started now.

Emily  15:54

Right. So this is a great time of year to think about it for those reasons. And also because you are currently in the thick of a school year, so you can really see any problems that may have arisen with the birthday celebrations. Maybe you did something you don’t want to continue, maybe you did something you do want to continue.

Heidi  16:10

Hopefully these questions got your wheels, turning a little bit about how you want things to run in your own classroom. And make sure to check out our other guiding questions so you can think through all of the nitty gritty, itty bitty details that make your classroom run so smoothly.

Emily  16:25

Yeah, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

Emily  16:28

Now let’s talk about this week’s teacher approved tip. Each week, we leave you with a small actionable tip that you can apply in your classroom today. This week’s teacher approved tip is to actually teach students how to take a test. What can you tell us about this, Heidi?

Heidi  16:43

If you have had the experience of watching your students take a standardized test, ou know how infuriating it can be. Your students know the content, you know, they know the content that you’re watching them make mistake after mistake on the test. I mean, it’s maddening. And you know, there are multiple reasons for this.

Heidi  17:02

But one reason is that the wording on a test can be so confusing. I pulled up some release test questions and this was like one of the very first ones on this test. And it proves my example perfectly. So this is the exact wording of a question that followed a reading passage.

Heidi  17:20

Read the dictionary entry in the box, head one to lead something, two, to go in a certain direction, three to give a title to four to place at the beginning of. Based on the passage, which meaning of the word head is used in paragraph one? A meaning one, B meaning to see meaning three, D meaning four.

Emily  17:45

Oh my gosh, it’s so unnecessarily confusing, right?

Heidi  17:49

The kids taking this test have to go through like three complicated steps before they can even choose an answer. Which leads us to the question, Is this really measuring your kids understand how to use dictionary skills, but whatever?

Heidi  18:00

Yeah, tricky wording is how the kids are going to make mistakes on tests and test publishers need 50% of kids to fail a question, in order for it to be a valid question, how woof. So how do we keep our students from falling into the 50% ho missed that question?

Emily  18:18

Especially the ones who miss it for no good reason, like they know the content, but just were confused.

Heidi  18:23

Yeah, and fortunately, there’s no guarantee. But one strategy is to teach your students about testing. A standardized test is like its own genre of literature. So we can teach it the same way we taught the genres of fables and biographies. And we do that by planning lessons that highlight the features of a test and give students lots of experiences working with those features.

Emily  18:49

Yeah, so if my students are going to have questions like the one you read, I want to make sure to teach my students how to go back to a certain place in a text. Maybe the paragraphs are numbered, but maybe they’re not. I also need to teach students how to go back into the question to find information. A lot of kids probably won’t even recognize the choices of meaning one and meaning two refer to the different definitions of head listed in the question.

Heidi  19:14

Yeah, why they couldn’t just make the definitions, the options on the test seriously, it’s maddening. Kids also need support and understanding things like when to choose all of the above, or what to do when a couple of answers seemed like the right choice, but they can only pick one. There is really actually a lot to unpack with the genre of a multiple choice test.

Emily  19:38

With these end of your tests, knowing how to take your test is almost as important as knowing the right answer.

Heidi  19:43

No joke.

Heidi  19:45

To wrap up the show we are sharing what we’re giving extra credit to this week, Emily, what gets your extra credit?

Emily  19:50

I’m giving extra credit to my new Kindle accessories fancy. I upgraded my generic Amazon Kindle case, to one from a shop called Page which has really fresh, fun modern designs. I just got a brightly colored geometric pattern. But there are some funny ones that say things like not smudge on the cover, which definitely means that is smudge.

Emily  20:16

And our mom gave us both Kindle page turner remotes for Christmas. And I thought I didn’t need this book guys is a total game changer. You clip a little receiver onto your Kindle. And then you can prop it up or put it on a stand and use your remote to turn the pages. So much more comfortable, especially if you want to like lay on your side of bed, or keep your arms warm under a blanket. Both of these have been big boosts to my reading life.

Heidi  20:43

You can’t go wrong with that.

Emily  20:44

What are you giving us credit to Heidi?

Heidi  20:46

Well, this is much less exciting. But my extra credit goes to the Harth amber light bulb. I have had the same amber light bulb with my bedside lamp since 2016, I think, and it finally burned out the other day. And when I was replacing it, I just had this moment where I realized how much I enjoy having that light in my bedroom. It gives everything kind of a soft sensory glow. And like I really do appreciate the coziness.

Heidi  21:16

But the real reason I started using an amber light bulb was for this circadian rhythm benefits because my sleep is all wacky. Regular light bulbs use too much blue light, and that can make it hard to fall asleep. So I like that I can have this in my lamp before bed or I can turn it on in the middle of the night without worrying that my brain is going to start thinking that it’s time to get up. There are lots of brands of amber light bulbs that are probably all similar. I haven’t tried any of the other ones. But I will put a link in the show notes to the Harth brand that I liked.

Emily  21:47

And you got me one, but I haven’t used it yet. So when my light bulb burns out, I’ll have to put this put that went in there and give it a try.

Heidi  21:55

That’s it for today’s episode. Remember to focus your test review time on the big rocks in your curriculum. And don’t forget to teach your students how to understand the genre of testing.