Literacy Interview Report

I conducted an interview with my assistant principal on December 8, 2017 at a middle school in South Georgia. This interview offered valuable information about the value of literacy assessments in my school setting. The interviewee began his teaching career as a Math teacher and have always loved numbers. Being a leader and leading innovation in teaching, learning, and assessment, he became more involved with inspiring his staff and supporting curriculum leaders in stimulating sharing of good teaching practices, including assessment and ongoing development on analyzing assessments. To him, literacy includes multidimensional skills such as listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing, and performing. He also shared that it is important for all educators to know about literacy

The interviewee also stated that both assessments are used as a screener to identify which students need extra academic support and which students need accelerated support. He stated that both the STAR and Georgia Milestones results are also used for instructional planning. He revealed that teachers come together to collaborate and analyze the literacy assessment data by visiting once a month the data room and conducting a data walk. In the data room, the data team post data for each grade level displaying, tracking, and analyzing STAR, common assessments, benchmarks, and Georgia Milestones information. He explained that in this room, teachers not only find the relevant pieces of data and understand what the data signify, but also select an instructional approach that addresses the situation identified through the data and frame instructionally relevant questions that can be addressed by the data. By doing this, he believes plays a huge part in our school’s academic growth which is higher than 94% of schools in the state and higher than our