Hello Everyone,

It was nice to meet several of you and I am looking forward to learning more from all of you throughout our time together!

Within our district, we sometimes struggle to get students to fully engage with universal screening. I am planning to connect with the teachers I am coaching this year and work to help staff understand the value of the information collected via universal screening. My hope is that if we create a solid understanding with all staff that we can then work together to come up with a plan which will help engage more students.

The teams I am supporting have done some data digging, but we are in various places. My goal is to continue to push this work forward and to be able to implement some class and individualized interventions based on the data collected.

At our school, the Intervention Teachers give all students K-5 the universal screen during the first full two weeks of school.  We use FAST Bridge.  Students that fall below the cut score are given the PRESS Phonemic Awareness Inventory or the Decoding Inventory.  Classes that need a class-wide are then delivering the class-wide intervention for two weeks and then the class is given a progress monitor to see if the class-wide was effective.  Our Intervention team then determines all tier two students and their intervention.  We give teachers folders with the students intervention and progress monitor dates.  As students progress through the skills their interventions change.  We repeat this process three times a year.

We are still in the process of completing our universal screeners at our school.  Once that is done, we are going to do analysis to determine which classes need classwide intervention and which students need individualized intervention.  We meet right away as a SAT team to look at students who were already in Tier 3 interventions the year before so that we can get started with those students right away, and then assign varying staff members to check on all of our other students that we are monitoring.  We still have work to do with giving assessments, but we are well on our way to success this year!

Hi everyone!  Time sure is flying by these first few weeks of school.  Our building has a Site Assessment Team, including a Site Assessment Coordinator, so we have some good systems in place for screeners but, as Christin said, student engagement is often a challenge.   Last year, we began delving deeper into diagnostics (some), interventions and progress monitoring.  We rolled it out to specific programs for students who were below their grade level benchmark on the aReading.  This year, we will be expanding our efforts to reach more students.  We also have an increased emphasis on core instruction and 90 minutes of literacy.

Hi everyone!  We are currently testing using our universal screener, Fastbridge.  Having said that, when that process is finished we will begin to collect our PRESS data.  I am curious about what other schools are doing for fluency percentages.  I know that PRESS says 93% but Fastbridge says 95% for fluency.  That has not been discussed at our building by administration yet that I am aware of. We are behind in our testing at this time due to the change over of Fastbridge K-5. Once data has been collected, there will be data meetings to determine classwide interventions with teachers to begin implementing. Starting PRESS typically runs smoothly, but we are very concerned about how PRESS will run after the classwide.  We have less interventionists in our building and while we have helped with PRESS, we are not sure how we will be able to do that this year.  I know we are looking for ideas on how to help our teachers deliver multiple interventions in the day and still do everything else. Suggestions are more than welcome!

We are just in the process of getting our universal screening done using FastBridge. This is our 4th year using FastBridge and we were seeing great variability in the delivery of the assessments. Anyone giving assessments this year was required to complete the FastBridge certification process. When reflecting with our group, we discovered some misunderstandings around administration and scoring. It was well worth the time. One of our schools has developed a great system for screening. The interventionists each specialize in one or two subtests of earlyReading, earlyMath, or in CBMreading. The entire class comes to the Media Center and rotates through stations. It's pretty quick and painless.

Once the screening is done, we move on to identify who might need a PRESS phonemic awareness or decoding inventory in preparation for our fall data meetings and decision making around interventions.

Laura, we struggled a bit at first with the difference in accuracy expectations between PRESS and FastBridge, but decided to use the PRESS accuracy rate. There is a place to click "More Data" on the group screening report which will show you the accuracy. We used that to find anyone below 93%. 

Hey PRESS Leaders!

What a start of the school year! We are jumping in head first. Sometimes it feels like it is into an empty pool but we keep on trucking!

The school that I coach at set a deadline for teachers to get assessments done within the first two weeks. And, majority have meet this goal:) We have gone through both screening and diagnostics, not the Press diagnostics, but our own version. As for getting PRESS started, that has not quite rolled out. We adopted a new curriculum so that has procured a lot of time to get going. However, after chatting with several teachers, we have been compiling a list of who woud benefit from some of the interventions. We also are making plans to roll this out in the near future. 

At the end of next week we are going to leading PD and some of the dicussion will be around MTSS and what we have to support those levels. I am hopeful that this will spark conversation. 

Take care!

In ROCORI, we are also beginning our fall Fastbridge testing. We are starting with aMath. The interventionists are beginning earlyReading (K-1) and CBMs for 2-3. Classroom teachers will give aReading and AUTOreading with their students next year. In our first early release, we'll be reviewing the PRESS powerpoint and having a classroom teacher model how he conducted his classwide intervention last year. Teachers will have time with grade levels to work with their Screening to Intervention Reports to determine if they need a classwide intervention. Intervention staff will also conduct 6 Week Check Ins with each classroom teacher to monitor progress of students in interventions and to recommend any students not making growth to our RtI and SAT teams. By January, we have another early out, and we are hoping to begin introducing the concept of fidelity checks for interventions. For this first year we'll keep fidelity checks anonymous so that teachers are a bit less apprehensive for them. Moving forward, we'd love to provide some choice for teachers to have fidelity checks done through videotape, a peer, or a member of the PRESS Leadership Team.

Hello! 

I am currently on maternity leave and transitioning into an interventionist role this year when I return to school in November so I am familiar with PRESS from the perspective of a classroom teacher.  I would like to hear how other schools incorporate data meetings for PRESS into their teachers' schedules?  How often are data meetings taking place?  Are these teacher-initiated meetings or required by admin? 

I am hoping that all of the assessing is going well so that teachers are able to start implementing PRESS in their classrooms soon!  It sounds like our building is working through the kinks of assessing all students K-5 with Fast Bridge for the first time this fall.  We have only used Fast Bridge in K-1 prior to this year.  After Fast is completed, our intervention teachers will be able to start PRESS assessments and help teachers determine classwide interventions. 

Thanks!