Time Spent in the Teacher's Lounge

Today I administered a diagnostic assessment for the first grade student I'll be be teaching reading to. Both my partner and I did the same assessments for each of our students, but since we'll be writing and teaching our lessons together, we have to write our lessons based off the lowest score of either student. So, since my student knows three of the 26 letter sounds of the alphabet but my partner's student knows seven, we will be teaching both students nearly all the letter sounds from scratch even though both students aren't presently at the same level of performance.

It was frustrating for me to assess my student for several reasons. First, she was squirmy and more excited than usual today, which did not help her concentration or attention span. Second, the classroom teacher put us all (my partner, the two students, and me) in the teacher's lounge, so my student was hearing both my partner and me talking which confused her. She couldn't concentrate on my voice alone. Third, since the door to the lounge doesn't close, my student was very distracted by the noise in the hallway. Finally, she wasn't doing very well on the exercises I was asking her to perform, so she was frustrated before we even finished the assessment. I don't know how accurate her scores were considering all these environmental factors, but I have to take her score and results as they are and use them as the basis for planning out the next two weeks of reading instruction.