TFA and a Happy New Year to you

It is January.

In case you haven't checked.

I think resolutions are lame. But if forced to make one, mine would be to blog at a regular rate. I was chastised by countless (2) friends for not updating my blog often enough. Apparently waiting a month between posts is just unacceptable.

My goal will be two a week.

I want to decompress my vacation on here but I am not yet in the mood for that. Instead, here comes some TFA brilliance.

TFA is a data driven organization. Following their mission of making a service organization that is attractive to the top college graduates and can compete with wall street type companies, TFA adopted the business model of these same wall street firms in terms of their goals, operation, processes etc.

What this means for me, as a corps member, is that I have regular performance reviews (called Round X observation) by my program director. Between these reviews, I am continually planning, teaching, assessing, reflecting and improving in a endless cycle.

The data comes from assessments. A master teacher ought to assess students knowledge before a unit/lesson to see what basic knowledge or gaps already exist, during the unit to see how the students are progressing and after the unit to see if the students did indeed learn what they were supposed to learn and to find what areas need to be retaught.

So. I have all of these tests that I have written or acquired or whatever. And I give them to my students, when they have finished a unit. They take the tests, and I record their 'mastery' in this giant excel file that I am somewhat ashamed to say excites me. And I am supposed to use this data to "inform my instruction".

I am good at collecting data. I enjoy it even. I like seeing the progress my students have made, what areas they have done well in, and those that need more work.

What I suck at, is the dissecting of this data. I am supposed to be looking for 'trends'. Do all the students failing sit in one area of the class? Are they all males? Are they all females? Are they all black? Are they all Hispanic? Do they all skip homework? Do they all write left handed?

I am supposed to look at this spreadsheet of numbers and figure this out.

And I can't.

Not only that, but my goal as a teacher (in Teach for America) is to make "Significant Gains" for my students. We are trying to put our students on a different life path, one that is dominated by education and opportunity and not by minimum wage/lack of choice. Because TFA wants this to be a measurable accomplishment (that way we can publish pretty statistics...and we can improve ourselves) there are two choices for achieving these gains: 80% of students master grade objectives (as determined by the state) or 2 years of growth in a specific subject.

And for me, significant gains is impossible.

Rather, *showing* that I have significant gains is impossible.

My school system has no way of assessing years of growth. So I have to use 80% mastery as my significant gains measure.

My students still add with their fingers.

My 7th grade mastery numbers are 29% and 35%.