In an uncertain fall, remote assessments and focus skills offer clarity

Whether they are administered at school or at home, interim assessments will be critical in identifying and addressing the gaps from last year as quickly as possible. The goal, of course, is to get students back on track to meet grade-level requirements for this year.

Where to Focus?

Education experts predict that students will be, on average, further behind this fall than they have been in years past, and that the “COVID Slide” will create wider gaps in performance than the usual summer slide. With all these challenges, how will teachers decide which gaps to focus on first?

To help, Renaissance released Focus Skills, the essential K–12 literacy and math skills that students must master to progress to other skills—and made them freely available to every school and district.

“Take, for example, the ability for kindergarten students to recognize letters and the sounds they make,” explained Dr. Gene Kerns, Chief Academic Officer at Renaissance. “That is a basic phonics skill that students must master in order to progress. If they can’t recognize letters or pair them with the correct sounds, their literacy progress will halt indefinitely. That is why this is a Focus Skill.”

While teachers know that some skills are more important than others, it sometimes leads to a bit of contention.

“I say to teachers all the time that standards aren’t optional,” said Janice Pavelonis, assistant superintendent of curriculum at Carbondale Elementary School District #95 in Illinois. “You have to teach them all. So the idea of prioritizing standards really was hard for me.”

Pavelonis said she feels uncomfortable with the idea of removing certain standards based on opinions, even expert opinions, rather than research. Leaning on Focus Skills this fall is different, however.

“I have been training our teachers for the last two years on how to address learning gaps while continuing to deliver grade-level content,” she explained. “Using the identified Focus Skills allows me to feel confident these are the right skills to prioritize to ensure our students have what they need to grow.”

The Focus Skills map each critical skill to the standards of every state and give teachers the ability to toggle back and forth between grades, K–12, so they can see what critical skills their students may have missed out on.

And while there is much we don’t know about the coming school year, the question of what students need to know now—and how teachers can most effectively teach it—will be clear with a strategic combination of assessments and targeted instruction on the skills that matter most.

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