1. Celebrate!
The math standards have now “Graduated” from draft to draft to draft to draft to official adopted standards!
Official rule text will be posted soon (but isn’t yet!). Be careful – four draft versions are posted now, but ~100 revisions were made on the day of adoption!
K-8 go in effect and HS in , contingent upon the simultaneous release of instructional materials.

2. Planning for Intervention
Guiding Questions for STAAR and beyond
We held a session with Math Teachers to allow for planning time for intervention around EOCs. Our original thought was this day would be very focused on ninth graders after EOC, but we quickly learned a much broader range of students exist that need intervention, including TAKS, 8th grade Pre-AP students, etc…

3. We want to talk to you today about a series of guiding questions we used with these teachers as they developed their intervention plans for the variety of situations that may exist.
Planning

4. Audience The first question to consider is: WHO? Who is your audience?
How will you identify student to participate in the program?
Who needs to hear what you learn and what you plan? (administrators, teachers that will execute program, etc…)
Audience

5. Needs Assessment The next question is: WHAT do they already know?
Gathering student data and using this to drive your program content development will be critical in order to best leverage limited time and resources.
Discuss methods/strategies for needs assessment, including:
Looking at SE and Reporting Category data from STAAR
Student self-assessments
Teacher assessments or feedback from the year
6 wk grades
Benchmark tests
“Pre-test” as part of intervention (avoid too much of this when other data exist)
Other

6. Content Emphasis
As you consider the details of the content development, two questions arise:
1) What is the primary emphasis of the course content? (Prep for next course, test-taking strategies, Readiness Standards, Reporting Category, Calculator skills, Content Area Literacy, or other areas of emphasis)
2) What are you doing that’s different from what they’ve already seen? Keeping in mind that students have already been presented with the entire course content, how can topics be re-bundled or approached differently the second time around?

7. Progress Monitoring How are we going to track the students’ progress?
Research shows that for intervention programs to be successful, their progress must be monitored. This progress monitoring is even more powerful when it is done BY THE STUDENTS!
Knowing this, the method for tracking progress over the course of your intervention program must not be forgotten.
This doesn’t need to be elaborate – a simple chart with check boxes may be enough, but it’s important to provide something where students can see what they’ve learned!

8. Resources
Now that the basic outline has been established, you can consider the details. What resources will use to execute the program?
Don’t forget to consider resources beyond just books! Teachers, technology, manipulatives, etc… are also resources to exploit.
Here, we must ask again – What are you doing that’s different from what they’ve already seen? And keep best practice in mind. We know that manipulatives and other physical models are critical steps to understanding, especially for struggling students. Time to bring those Algebra Tiles out of the closet!
This time may begin with brainstorming a list of resources and then carefully selecting the best based on careful alignment with the previously discussed goals and the Texas TEKS and blueprint.

9. Thoughtful Questions What do students already know?
What will be different from what they’ve already seen?
How will students monitor their progress?
How can we help?
Emily Gray Susan Hemphill
So – the three big questions:
What do students already know?
What’s different from what they’ve already seen?
How will you monitor progress?
If you need help with facilitating these conversations, we’d love to talk with you!