If you are a classroom teacher, then you are probably very familiar with documenting student data and progress. Documenting the differentiation you are providing for every single student while also teaching said students can feel impossible. Hopefully, these tips for organizing your math intervention documentation will make it all more manageable. Plus, there are a few freebies to get you started, so keep reading!
TRACKING PROGRESS
Once I became more skilled at pulling a small group while managing a classroom full of other students, I was ready to level up and track data. What was the point of pulling a small group if I couldn’t see if it was making a difference? I created this Small Group Progress Monitoring Printable to document how my small group of students were progressing.
I made a ton of blank copies, put them inside a binder, and filled them out whenever I pulled a small group.
If you want a copy for your classroom, you can grab it (along with a few others) here.
KEEP IT SIMPLE
Keep it simple is pretty much my moto! State testing is right around the corner, and this idea worked really well for my smaller intervention class. This requires some work upfront, but makes the day-to-day, in-class mental load lighter. Here is a solution that worked for me:
- Create one page with all of the standards listed in kid-friendly language. This is your cover sheet.
- Create a packet of material that students need the most help with. I would use material from our State Testing Units – the 10 question assessments were perfect. Make the exact same packet for all of your intervention students.
- Staple the cover sheet to the packet. The cover sheet is where I differentiated! I highlighted the skills that the individual student needed to work on based on what I saw from their benchmark. For example, Student A might have dividing decimals highlighted amongst other highlighted skills while Student B might have integer operations and creating equivalent fractions highlighted. Student A could find the section titled dividing decimals and start there. The next day, they would go to the next highlighted skill. The cover sheet included a space for me to check off when they mastered the skill.
Students were practicing exactly what they needed to work on, and I didn’t have to make 15 different worksheets to hand out to 15 different students and try and keep up with who got what.
Note: Since I took the picture above, Maneuvering the Middle has created an Intervention Binder for both TEKS and CCSS that has a more comprehensive overview of all of the standards. The Student Data Sheet would be perfect to use as a cover sheet.
MAKE IT VISUAL
After completing a unit, I passed back their unit tests along with a unit test reflection. The unit test reflection broke down the test into the 3-5 skills that were tested. Next to the skills, were boxes with the question numbers that aligned to those skills. Students would go through their test and color in green for questions they got correct and red for problems they got wrong. This created a great visual for students to see what skills they still needed to develop.
Students were then able to reflect more effectively on their strengths and their areas needing growth. I had students keep these reflections in their notebook, so on days when we used Khan Academy or IXL, they could refer to this page and work on the skills they had not mastered yet. If students hit below a certain threshold, you could assign a video reteaching the topic – a perfect use of our Maneuvering the Middle Student Video Library. Click here to grab your Test Analysis printable!
This reflection never quite took an entire class period, so I paired it with test corrections.
USING EXIT TICKETS
Exit tickets are another way to decide who needs to go into a small group and what you should reteach or practice in the small group.
When I am looking through the exit tickets, I would sort the exit tickets, not according to their grade, but by what the misconception is. Let’s say the exit ticket is over adding fractions.
- I might have one stack of exit tickets where students did not find a common denominator and just added the numerator and denominator together (conceptual understanding).
- Another stack would be for students who made a computation error (procedural fluency).
- Lastly, I might have a stack of students who couldn’t decode the word problem (application).
Of course, some exit tickets might fall into all three categories, but these different stacks allowed me to prioritize what students to pull in my small group, who just needs more practice, and who needs to be completely retaught.
I hope that this post provided some easy take-aways on how to organize math intervention in your classroom. Similar to how we scaffold for students, scaffold some of these organization systems into your daily routine. Choose the tip that would be the most helpful to you or would be the easiest to implement and give it a try!
What tips do you have for organizing math intervention?
For more tips on pulling small groups, check out Tips for Small Group Implementation here. Interested in learning more about our Math Intervention Binder? Check out the video below.