Every teacher strives to ensure that they are targeting each lesson effectively, ensuring all students can grasp the content and express understanding despite their individual level.
But this is often difficult to achieve in an actual classroom setting. For a start, how do you make sure that everyone is achieving without that process becoming more time-consuming than the actual teaching itself? Checks for learning at the end of a class are often undermined by time pressures, while fresh assessments of past learning at the beginning of a lesson threaten to be time consuming to the point of eating into new instruction.
A 2015 report by the Grattan Institute highlighted the importance of targeted teaching. The report noted that on average in a single class anywhere in Australia you would likely find differences in achievement of “five to eight year levels”. The Grattan Institute’s modelling showed that, “If all teachers targeted their teaching … it could lift performance enough to put Australia among the top five education systems in mathematics, reading and science in the PISA assessments.” (Grattan Institute, 2015 p. 7).
CARS & STARS Online is built on the core belief that no student learns the same way or at the same pace, and this knowledge informs the whole program – making it one built on targeted instruction and differentiation as its central concept, rather than something added later to complement existing, more rigid instruction.
The very first element of CARS & STARS Online is the Placement Test, which assigns students to a reading level appropriate for them from the very beginning. As they progress through pretests, benchmarks and post-tests, students are carefully monitored, producing consistent and continuous data that allows the teacher to stay fully on top of their progression and modify instruction accordingly.
The teacher is still fully in control, but CARS & STARS Online makes that control as easy to exercise as simply scrolling through a list. By receiving instant access to results as they are entered by the student, the teacher can utilise up-to-the-second information to guide instruction and decide where they will take students next.
Recommended Lessons across both CARS & STARS Online and FOCUS Reading make sure that content is matched to need and ability, providing teacher certainty. With CARS & STARS Online, targeted teaching for every student is no less valuable – it’s just a lot easier for teachers to achieve.
If you are interested in learning more about the CARS & STARS Online subscriptions and how they can help children to achieve better results, then sign up for a free trial to be an integral part of your child’s reading success.
