Open House vs. Assessment Days

 

Open House vs. Assessment Days:  
One Teacher’s Perspective

       I am a teacher.  I became a teacher because I love kids and want to help kids to love learning.  Most days I am excited to get up in the morning and start my day working with my seven-and-eight-year-old second graders.  But, there is one day when I am not excited to get up in the morning.  That day is Open House!     
       Picture this:  You have 26 students whom you have never met.  You have been busy all day preparing the classroom and writing student names on lockers and desks and workbooks.  The students can enter your classroom anytime between 5:00 and 7:00.  Most of them come at the same time!  They come with parents, grandparents, siblings, and sometimes a second set of parents.  It can be hard to tell which child is the second grader as they come in various sizes!  It is always hard to keep track of which child goes with which parent!  You don’t know which parents are divorced, so that can be akward.  While you try to greet everyone as they come into the room in droves, your mouth starts to hurt from smiling so much and you can’t remember which child you asked about his/her summer and which ones you haven’t.  They unpack their bursting backpacks and you try to direct where tissues and paintshirts go while parents start to surround you to tell you important information about their child.  Again, you can’t remember which child goes with which parent!  And, then sometimes a name can be either a boy’s name or a girl’s name and inevitably you guess the wrong one and the parent is offended.  You grab a notebook to write down one kid’s allergy, while you listen to tales of woe about summer illnesses or parent anxiety.  All the while, you are trying desperately to make a good, confident first impression, when all you truly feel is like you are caught in the middle of a tornado!  Then once the room empties, you have to translate your own messy notes, re-do many of the name tags because John goes by “Johnny” and you spelled Anabella wrong!  It’s exhausting!
      This year Becker Primary and Becker Intermediate chose to try something a little different.  We are going to use the first two days of school as an opportunity to spend time with each individual child.  At their scheduled conference time, a student will come to the classroom, put his/her things in his/her desk and then sit down with the teacher for a beginning-of-the-year asssessment.  In the meantime, the parent sits in the hallway and fills out forms, watches an introductory video on the i-pad, and reads the classroom newsletter.  Once the assessment is done and the teacher has gotten a few minutes to talk with the parent, the two of them go to a number of stations around the school.  So, “Johnny” gets his LifeTouch picture taken in one room, gets tested on Reading Fluency (Dibels) and 200 High Frequency Words by friendly interventionists and knowledgeable specialists, and does an active SMART assessment with a Physical Education teacher.  Moms get to pay for lunch and milk break, update Skyward family information, and buy their child a special book bag, clear folder, and headphones!  Uff-dah!
      What you may not know, is that these Assessment Days save us weeks of valuable learning time!  It takes at least an hour per classroom to get fall photos taken from Life Touch.  The Dibels test takes 30 minutes per classroom and uses all the interventionists in the school for up to three weeks.  That means those interventionists cannot be working with students for three weeks!  They are simply assessing.  What a waste of valuable learning time!  The High Frequency Words are usually done by the classroom teacher in addition to the beginning-of-the-year assessment.  It takes approximately 45 minutes per child to do those two tests. 
      Now picture this:  As the teacher, you know this time of year is crucial to creating the type of atmosphere you desire for your classroom.  You have only begun to explain classroom procedures and expectations.  Very few routines are perfected.  Students are “testing” the teacher to see what they can get away with.  And, what are you supposed to do?  Individually test each child (for 45 minutes) as the rest of the class is kept busy.  What?!?!  Are you crazy?  A child can only read or color or do busy work for so long!  What a stressful situation!  In addition, the child you are testing is being distracted by the other students in the room, the loud new kindergarten class in the hallway, the 4th graders playing mini golf for Gym outside, and the telephone ringing!  Not ideal!  There must be another way!
       As a teacher, I am extremely grateful that there is another way!  Assessment Days are the way to go!  This year I am not as stressed out as usual.  I am enjoying getting the final touches of my classroom ready.  I am excited to spend one-on-one time with each student next week.  And, I truly appreciate the extra effort the parents are making to help make these days possible.