STAAR Spaghetti 'Strandards'

Why You Are Actually A Spaghetti Teacher

Planning for new Reading teachers can be like a giant bowl of spaghetti. Imagine that you, the teacher, are a meatball, freshly ground out of your university and seasoned and seared a little with some guided teaching experience. You finally find a bowl that will hire you on for that dream job: Reading! You love books more than anything, and you can't wait to impart that to your students, but first, you have to do something--you have to plan how to teach to them. What are you teaching them? This big confusing plate of spaghetti strandards:

The state tells you to teach the children this bowl of strandards (the TEKS, which is composed of SE's), but how do you do it? Where do you start? Unlike math, where everything stacks up like a building, reading skills are all interconnected and mixed together. Which way is up? Which way is down? Good, balanced literacy sauce holds it all together and flavors it, but at the end of the year, the state is going to rate your school's performance based on one thing:

the STAAR test.

Did your students eat all the spaghetti strandards or not? How well did they get it?

The guidance tool given to lead your little bowl is called the TEKS, which is a legal document accumulation of SE's (student expectations). You're familiar with them as little codes like 5.2B or 4.6A and they're all sub-categorized as Readiness Standards or Supporting Standards.

Your district will provide you with a scope and sequence of when to teach these standards, and some districts may even provide trainings where you 'analyze' the SE's (spaghetti strandards!) by having you make sentence diagrams and circle all the parts of speech in different colors to somehow convey the depth of meaning of the legal verbiage provided by the state. This might be beneficial to people who are not strong verbal thinkers, but most likely, if you're a Reading teacher, you're not one of those people and you understand the SE you read as you read the first time through.

So I want to challenge you to take your understanding deeper in a more effective way, a way that aligns how you think about the standard with how your school is rated for teaching it.

Comparing Reading SE's to STAAR

If you have been teaching for more than a year, you've seen the elephant. You know that your passion for imparting a love literacy isn't enough for success in the world of standardized testing (and if you do teach somewhere where this is not true, do let me know). The rest of us must be tactical. Pushing the bowl of spaghetti across the table isn't enough. We must be spaghetti generals, if I can be permitted to make this extended metaphor any sillier. 

I have created a chart (through many hours of blood, sweat and labor) that places each question stem from the last three years of released STAAR tests for 3rd, 4th and 5th grade alongside the SE that is tagged as testing. While it's nothing new for teachers to create question stem cards from the tests, I've not yet seen anyone compile them into one hulking monster for Reading Spaghetti Generals to slay.

Until now, that is. 

You can download the chart at my TPT website for free at:

Ramon Readasaurus TPT Store

Suggestions for Spaghetti Generals on How to Interpret the Chart

As a professional (and general) in the field of education, you can read the chart and draw as many conclusions as you wish. I suggest you consider the following:

• How do what the questions ask on STAAR compare with the wording in the SE? 
• Is my teaching of this skill including making my students think the way the test is asking them to think? 
• What words show up most frequently in the stems for my grade level or 3-5?
• Which SE's are tested most heavily? Why is that? 
• Is the time I spend on any single SE widely disproportionate to how heavily its tested? (I know heat maps are popular right now, but if you've got a low percentile on text structures are you really getting the bang for your buck by targeting a skill that's rarely tested?)
• When will you review this? At the beginning of each six weeks? At the beginning of each unit? With your team?

Sample Reflection

Good teachers model their thinking for their students, so I'll take my own figurative medicine here, and then bid you a fond farewell till next time.

When I used to read the SE above in blue, 5.10A, before having STAAR stems to compare it to, I was unsure of whether I was teaching 'drawing conclusions', 'author's purpose' or 'evaluating' the work itself and comparing it the intended purpose. It seems that the person who worded this statement meant something most similar to latter. It would have the students thinking at the second highest rung of Bloom's Taxonomy, but you can't really test that kind of thinking with colored bubbles.

So, when this skill is tested by STAAR what does it really mean? It means the second idea: author's purpose. The repeating idea in each of these particular stems is author's purpose.

The only repeating test vocabulary word I think my students might be uncomfortable with is 'selection,' so I'll be sure to put that in my vocabulary study and use it while teaching.

In the overall scheme of things, it's been tested five times, so it's likely to be tested, but not heavily. There are a lot of other nonfiction SE's competing with it. My students need to know it, but it's probably not going to destroy them if they're weak on it, unlike Figure 19D & E, 5.2B, or 5.6B.

Vertically, I notice that it hasn't yet been tested in third, tested once in 4th and primarily examined in 5th. I also notice that the intention of the SE for 4th correlates even less than the 5th grade version. Fourth grade teachers, beware. This is exactly why I made this chart--to show that knowing your SE's isn't enough during test season.

Disclaimer

Remember the spaghetti analogy from the beginning of this article? I want to remind you about the sauce. After reading through all the legalese and teacher verbiage here, you may be shaking your head and saying, "Tsk, tsk, she's telling me to teach to the test! I won't stop good literacy for this!"

I agree.

Don't ever forget the sauce (balanced literacy) and the dear faces of those for whom you were preparing the spaghetti anyway. The chart is only guide to inform you, to keep you from getting blindsided perhaps and accelerate your own understanding of an incredibly complicated matter: the teacher of reading.

I salute all of you.