Needs Assessment and Strategic Plan

Raisa Marrow

North Carolina State University

ECI 508-601

Dr. Jill Jones

February 17, 2019

Phase 1: Needs Assessment

At the beginning of the school year, we were informed as a staff that new mClass kits had
been adopted by the state. We were told the books had changed and that the writing portion of
mClass is now optional. We did not think too much of this at the time. Upon giving the
assessment at the beginning of the year, we noticed our scores were low, but this is not unusual
for kindergarten. Although my school is in an affluent district and many students have exposure
to books prior to starting kindergarten, the beginning of year expectations have always been a
little higher than the reality. It was not until the middle of year mClass window that my PLC
truly noticed a big problem. Our students’ middle of the year scores were still very low which is
not usually true at our school.
I decided to look at my students’ middle of year TRC scores. The expectation is that
students are reading at a level B. Over half of the students in my class were still reading at RB.
According to Bean and Dagen (2012), teachers should collaborate in order to be literacy leaders
and set goals to help student achievement, so I decided to bring this up to my team at the next
PLC meeting. This was good timing because we were due to talk about our intervention block
soon. We all looked at our TRC scores and found the same trends. We noticed a few of our lower
students still scoring at PC and our higher students scoring above end of year expectations. This
was typical. The true concern was our students in the middle. In years past, these students would
have been meeting middle of year expectations. This year they were all below expectations. I
have included data for each individual class as well as the entire kindergarten below.
After we analyzed the trends we were noticing and identified that we had a problem we
started to discuss reasons for this problem. Through our discussion we identified specific
changes to the mClass assessment that we believed were causing our drop in scores this year. I
have included the reasons that we brainstormed. After identifying these reasons we decided we
needed to make specific changes to our intervention block in order to best serve students and
combat these changes that were causing a drop in our scores. We also decided to meet and share
our findings with our literacy coach and principal to “collaborate with other educators to extend
learning, advance successful school improvement efforts through professional development, and
support shared vision and values” (Merideth, 2007). This strategic plan is included below.
Causes of low TRC scores
● The new books have less repeating patterns.
● The new books require more advanced decoding skills.
● The new books have less picture support.
● The new comprehension questions are more difficult.
● The MOY texts are nonfiction.
Phase 2 : Strategic Plan

Goal : To set up an intervention block to best serve students who are not meeting middle of
year TRC expectations on mClass by forming groups that account for the recent changes in
the assessment.

Action Steps Timeline

Meet as a PLC with our literacy coach and principal to further discuss 2/7/19
data trends and student needs

Form intervention groups based on needs 2/8/19

- cross checking
- high frequency word practice
- Tier 2 Fundations instruction
- nonfiction language Ex: main idea and key details

Gather progress monitoring tools to assess the effectiveness of 2/8/19

interventions
- TRC progress monitoring through mClass
- PSF progress monitoring through mCLass
- High Frequency Word Assessment

Create a Tier 2 document to track students progress 2/8/19

-Document that will be used

Start intervention groups 2/11/19

Progress monitor groups Every 3 weeks

beginning on 2/11/19

Assess effectiveness of interventions End of Q3 (around

4/5/19)

References

Bean R. M., & Dagen A. S. (2012). Best practices of literacy leaders: Keys to school
improvement. New York, NY: Guilford Press

Merideth, E. M. (2007). Leadership strategies for teachers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.