Ah, yes. The smell of anxiety and stress is in the air. Sweat pours down your face due to the enormous amounts of pressure you feel for your students to succeed. You’re grumpy. The children are a nervous wreck. It’s that time of the year again. State testing season.
I could expound for hours upon my personal feelings and beliefs about standardized testing, but doing that will result in nothing positive and only end up with me feeling even more anxious than I already do this time of year. So, here is my attempt to put a positive spin on things and bring you my best advice for surviving testing time. And hopefully, we’ll get through it with student success, as well!
Start Early
I’m not talking about teaching to the test. And while I realize that April is pretty late in the game for most of us, heed my advice for next year. Start teaching testing strategies from the beginning of the year. Dedicate a small portion of one day of the week to discussing testing. Not a whole lesson, not an entire day, not every day. Maybe 20 minutes every Friday.
Teaching should be authentic and not based on a test that is taken one day out of the entire year. As my principal is always telling us – this is one day. This is not an accurate reflection of who you are as a teacher, the other 364 days of the year (and yes, I realize we aren’t in the classroom all 365 days). But getting your students used to the strategies you feel work best for them from the very beginning of the year will certainly decrease the stress they (and you) are feeling when it comes to test day.
That Being Said…
I have had kids throw up on test day. I have had kids whose entire personality changed from pleasant and amenable to grumpy, distracted, and defiant in the weeks leading up to testing. I have had kids in tears on the daily so worried that they were going to fail. I’m talking about eight year olds! This is messed up, y’all.
I definitely feel I played a big part in putting the pressure on my kids as part of the testing cogworks, so I’ve mellowed out a lot since I first started teaching. State tests are not going to make or break you (incentivized teaching programs be damned) and they absolutely should not break your students.
Just as a state test that you administer one day out of the entire year should not be a reflection of who you are as a teacher, it also should not be a reflection of who your students are. Yes, teach the strategies. Yes, cover all the standards. Yes, even assign test formatted practice (but please no more than once a week!) But remember that ultimately, these are children. They are not mini-adults. They definitely should not be feeling grown-up level pressure and stress.
Make learning fun. And throw that necessary testing stuff in there while doing it.
Testing is Important, But…
The tests ARE a big deal. However, our entire year should not be based around them. Find a set of strategies that work for you and your students and implement them fully. Use them in non-testing related lessons. For example, one of the steps in my reading testing strategies is to make a prediction based on the title and text features. So guess what we do when we are doing a read aloud or reading a story from MyView? We make a prediction based on the title and text features.
It’s important when incorporating strategies into daily learning that you not over emphasize their role on the test. You might casually make a reference like, “Kids! Remember how we learned that making a prediction helped us set up our reading focus for a STAAR (my state’s test) passage? You can use that skill with anything you read to help you understand what you need to look for!” Let that be it. Make the connection, make it light hearted, and then move on with learning and making it fun. This reinforces that all reading is important and strategies can be used in any reading situation and takes the emphasis off of testing, testing, testing. Lightbulb moment for children: Oh! The test is just another thing to read!
Testing Shouldn’t Be That HARD
Testing time is no fun for anyone. Just remember to give yourself grace. Give your kids grace. You’ve done your job and taught them all they need to know. Now it’s time for them to put that knowledge into action. Yes, the test IS important, but it is not the be all, end all.
I’ve prepared for you my FREE Tips for Success guide for parents. All you do is print it out and send it home a few days before the test. I got you covered. Sign up below!
Thanks for hanging out with me today! I hope your state testing goes smoothly this year!
I will see you again (virtually!) soon!
Deedee
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