Tag Archives: setting reading goals

Goal Setting for Reading Success Part 4:

DETERMINING AND DELIVERING STRONG “MAGIC THREE” QUESTIONS

Jaclyn DeForgeJaclyn DeForge, our Resident Literacy Expert, began her career teaching first and second grade in the South Bronx, and went on to become a literacy coach and earn her Masters of Science in Teaching. In this series for teachers, educators, and literacy coaches, Jaclyn discusses different strategies for ensuring students hit end-of-year benchmarks in reading.

I’ve talked about how to set individual reading goals for students, the importance of student motivation and regular assessment and, most recently, about turning the running record assessment time into a meaningful conference by sending students back to their seats with their own personal “Magic Three,” a set of three questions to focus on while they read.  So where do “Magic Three” questions come from?

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Goal Setting for Reading Success: Empowerment Post-Assessment

Empowerment Post-Assessment

Jaclyn DeForgeJaclyn DeForge, our Resident Literacy Expert, began her career teaching first and second grade in the South Bronx, and went on to become a literacy coach and earn her Masters of Science in Teaching. In this series for teachers, educators, and literacy coaches, Jaclyn discusses different strategies for ensuring students hit end-of-year benchmarks in reading.

Two weeks ago, I shared with you some resources to use when determining a reading goal for each student, and last week I talked about how to motivate students about their reading goal and about how to Girl Reading, from Destiny's Giftschedule out regular assessment.  Today, I want to get into the nuts and bolts of the running record assessment time, and how to create a post-assessment conference that really empowers students.

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Goal Setting for Reading Success Part 1: Setting a reachable, standards aligned reading goal

Jaclyn DeForgeJaclyn DeForge, our Resident Literacy Expert began her career teaching first and second grade in the South Bronx, and went on to become a literacy coach and earn her Masters of Science in Teaching. In this series for teachers, educators, and literacy coaches, Jaclyn discusses different strategies for ensuring students hit end-of-year benchmarks in reading.

These days, the words testing or assessment tend to bring up many conflicting emotions among educators, but determining where your students need to be at the end of the year and how you (the teacher)are going to keep track of individual progress toward each standard is a key part of proactive planning.

With my students, it was really important to me that they feel ownership of their success by being able to clearly see how their actions affected their achievement, so we did a lot of individualized goal setting and consistently measured our progress toward said goals.  The result was a classroom full of empowered children who were aware of where they were strong and what they needed to work on, and confident in the knowledge that there was a plan as to how we were going to get there.  This transparency in teaching can absolutely yield huge rewards, but it does take some proactive planning.

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