Reading Specialist
Ann Hillman
hillmana@westosha.k12.wi.us
262-843-2321 ext.370
CRIS Course Syllabus
DEPARTMENT MISSION
The mission of Central High School's Reading Department is to introduce, practice and review reading and study strategies that encourage critical thinking and close reading of informational texts across the curriculum.
READING ASSESSMENT INFO
It is the Reading department's philosophy that assessment drives decision-making about students' current literacy skills or needs. We use a variety of assessments for different purposes. All CRIS students undertake a pre-testing/post-testing assessment called the Informal Reading Inventory (IRI; Roe & Burns, 2011) on their current skills at decoding and comprehending text, reported as grade levels. This allows us to determine and report a student's growth in these skill sets over a semester or a school year. The IRI is a nationally recognized, valid and reliable measure of literacy skills from pre-primary to twelfth grade levels.
Teachers or counselors may suspect that a student in regular education has an unidentified delay or gap in reading skills, and refer the student for testing. After attaining parental consent, the reading specialist will administer the IRI with the student, analyze the results, and recommend if there is need for remediation.
The CRIS class includes a number of classroom assessments for tracking students' development in literacy skills that aid comprehension of complex texts at grade level: spelling, vocabulary, summarizing, questioning, independent reading, inferencing and understanding text structures. As part of the differentiation within the class, some assessments include the incentive of exemption from further practice, if a student shows proficiency in that skill.
In addition, following Response to Intervention (RtI) guidelines from the federal IDEA law, the reading specialist is responsible for Tier 3 testing for students who have been referred to Special Education for Specific Learning Disability (SLD). We use AimsWeb to create baseline assessments and progress-monitor students to supply a preponderance of evidence in conjuction with additional testing by the school psychologist that aids in the final decision on a student's placement in regular or Special Education.
For further information, please contact the reading specialist and/or consult these resources:
Individuals With Disabilties Education Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1400 (2004)
Roe, B.D. & Burns, P.C. (2011). Informal Reading Inventory: Pre-Primer to Twelfth Grade (8th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.