Progress Monitoring

Chapter 4 also had a whole lot of information and technical terms that I had never heard of before. It was on informal assessments and the progress monitoring that comes with it. The types of assessments that were listed on there I have never used on my students. I did read about some like the DIBELS (available for pre-K through 6 grade) that are used in our district but they are only provided for kinder and up. The only assessment that we as pre-k teachers have to administer is the CIRCLE test which was created by the Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning and Education (CIRCLE). It is now the Children’s Learning Institute based out of the Health science center in Houston. I have also been involved with this organization through a grant that provided me with many classroom supplies that provide me with the materials that will help make my students successful. The TEEM grant also provided about 50 hours of teacher development in the area of early literacy through research based practices. The grant helped me to understand the assessment that we administer to our students and how the students will benefit in the long term if they are successful learners. The only problem is that I was only one of about 20 teachers involved in the grant that represented our whole district.