Happy Holidays from Alabama Stride

Good "Stride-ings" to You this Holiday Season! We are quickly approaching the glorious holiday season and a much-anticipated winter break for students and educators. Hooray!  We want to remind you that Stride will continue to be available to your students over the holidays to help keep skills sharp through engaging, game-based learning. Students may use their login codes to access Stride online, 24/7, from any internet connection.  Now is the perfect time to create a Holiday Contest, so students can compete over the break. Need a refresher on creating contests? Click here. Send us your Holiday Contest ideas, so we can feature your students and staff in an upcoming newsletter! Iola Roberts Elementary Presents "Zero Period" for RTI Iola Roberts Elementary in Pell City, AL, has designed a new approach to Response to Intervention that incorporates Stride's video lessons, customized printable resources, and quizzes. Cheryl Black, a third grade teacher, tells us: “Zero Period” is a program in the mornings where students can work on concepts that have not yet been mastered. This is time set aside three days a week to assist students who are struggling or need individual attention. " Whole Group and Individualized Instruction  Cheryl uses Class Summary Reports and her Stride teacher dashboard to identify which concepts should be addressed in a whole-group mini lesson, and which ones should be assigned individually. "If I notice that multiple students are struggling with patterns, I can click on the videos taband search this topic to bring up all related videos on the subject. By skimming the list, I can see which topic supports the standards I am focusing on."

Cheryl Black uses Stride video lessons on the whiteboard for whole-group instruction. Rewarding Hard Work with Fun The printable instructional resources that are tailored for each student are another tool for Zero Period. Cheryl believes the detailed lessons and examples provided are useful for teachers, students, and parents alike.  "Additionally, I can use StrideXChange to assign videos and quizzes to individual students on concepts that I have identified on their customized report as weak areas. I like having the option to require the student to review these items before proceeding to other work in Stride. This provides students with the opportunity to earn additional coins for games and rewards them for participating in Zero Period."  Below: Third graders work hard in Stride. "I have found the more I use Stride, the more I learn about what the program has to offer our students," says Cheryl. "The teachers and students at Iola appreciate the support we receive from Stride to ensure that our students meet grade level expectations at the end of each year."   Thank you to Cheryl Black, Iola Roberts Elementary, and CLAS Academic Specialist Rhonda Lewis, for sharing your story!   Do you have a Stride success story or implementation design to share? We would love the opportunity to highlight your students and staff in a future newsletter.  Contact Amy Frith at afrith@fueleducation.com Happy Holidays from the Stride and Fuel Education team! Be sure to follow @AlabamaStride on Facebook and Twitter!

Stride Science Curriculum Update

Stride Science Curriculum Update

Stride will be implementing updates to our Science curriculum for Alabama in grades 3-8.  All Science curriculum will now be directly aligned to the Alabama Science Standards, including newly added skills. This means more relevant content to better support our students.  Please see below for a full explanation of these updates: For these updates to take effect, the students’ current Science progress will be cleared.  They will then start over with the updated curriculum.   For the students to have maximum grade level exposure, Science will not be a part of the adaptive engine.  In lieu of the Progress Monitoring Assessment, teachers will be able to take advantage ofStride’s Quiz Builder feature to create Science assessments for their students. We are very excited about these improvements in our Science curriculum for Alabama and look forward to continuing to support our educators and students. Contact Stride Customer Support at 866.552.9192, ext. 2, or support@LTSed.com. Note: Stride Science will be temporarily unavailable from November 17th - November 22nd as we implement these updates.

New Look for "Settings" Tab

Teachers will notice a different look when clicking the "Settings" tab.




Everything that was there before is still there, only now you don't have to scroll. Menu items now display across the top.

Remember scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page to change your password? Now, it's a click away on the "Class Info" menu.

You'll have no difficulty with the new look. However, when you are used to one look, a different appearance comes as a surprise.

1,727

One thousand, seven hundred and twenty-seven...

That's how many PMAs were completed by Calhoun County students as of 10:00 AM on the second day of the PMA window.

Completing PMA within the first few days of the window offers several advantages:

1. You can take advantage of the Quiz Builder, Adaptive Engine (grades K-8), and changing the curriculum to just the standards you are focusing on right now.
2. You can give students their results and celebrate successes. When you run the Class PMA Report, you will see the overall score for each student in Math and Reading. The score from PMA1 and PMA2 appear side-by-side. You'll be able to see at a glance which students made big gains and which students did not progress.
3. From that same Class PMA Report, you can look at performance standard-by-standard. What was something you thought you taught well but the scores did not reflect that? You will be able to see what you may want to reteach. If you want to do small group instruction based on any standard, run the Student Grouping Report. Choose the appropriate time frame and watch the software divide the students into three groups based on how well they have performed on that standard.

Do you have something neat happening at your school you would like to spotlight?

Let me know. Send photos and descriptions of what's happening. As I visit your school, be sure to direct me to the things you would like to see featured.

Progress Monitoring Assessment Window Extended Through Tuesday

I received word on Friday that the final day for PMA 1 has been extended until Tuesday, October 24. For schools that still have students yet to take PMA, this extra two days provides an unexpected opportunity. Remember, PMA is given in K-8th grade. There is no PMA for Algebra 1, Geometry, etc.

For students who have started the first PMA

Here is an important point to understand about PMA. When the PMA period ends, it a student has not yet begun PMA, he or she is out of luck. However, if the student has started PMA, the program allows that student to finish even after the PMA period is over.

What that means is that the critical thing is to have any student who has not started PMA to get at least one question answered by Tuesday. Then, you can finish...hopefully very soon.

Why the whole thing should be a non-issue

Many of you are going to be saying, "PMA 1? Didn't we do that over a month ago?"

Yes, you did...or at least most did. Since PMA is automatically served up to students when they log in, the program takes care of that requirement for you.

PMA takes about 30 minutes for Reading and 30 minutes for Math. The only way for a student not to have completed PMA would be for the student to have used Stride less than an hour cumulatively between September 4 and now.

In many classrooms, PMA started September 4 and students had completed it by September 5. The design of the grant is for Stride to be use extensively.

The next PMA starts November 6.

Best practice

Best practice is to look at the PMA windows and within the school set a fairly narrow window during which your school will administer PMA. For schools which use the program daily, this part takes care of itself.

Since a student must complete PMA before doing any other work in the program, a student who has not completed PMA would not get a teacher-made Quiz Builders, the Stride Adaptive engines, or questions geared to teacher-selected standards. So, doing PMA early allows teachers to give feedback and make decisions about instructions based on overall performance on various standards.

If your students are still doing PMA 1,here is a suggested plan:

• Schedule time to complete PMA 1 What gets scheduled gets done.
• As soon as the last students completes PMA 1, look at the Class PMA Report. Examine the standards you have taught but yet students performed poorly. Decide which ones you may want to reteach between now and November 6. 
• Let students know how they performed on PMA 1. The Class PMA Report gives you this information.
• When you complete PMA 2, look especially at the standards you retaught to see what improvement was made.

Progressing Through PMA

The first Progress Monitoring Assessment ends October 13.

You have the ability to run a report on PMA for both the school and the classroom level.

Running the PMA Report at the School Level:

1. Use the school administrative login to access Stride Academy.
2. Click the "Reports" tab.
3. Click the blue "Generate Real-Time Reports" button.
4. Click "View Reports."
5. From the list of reports which appears, click "School PMA Report."
6. The defaults on the next screen should be OK as is.
7. Click the red "Apply" button.

You will notice that the graph is the first page of almost two-dozen pages of data. You can click through those graphs and tables to see data for each class and data for each grade level.

My recommendation would be to share with any given teacher the data for that teacher's class and the average for the grade level as a whole. That way, each teacher gets an idea where he or stands in relationship to the rest of the pack without ranking teachers. Richard Defoor addresses this point in his PLC seminars.



Running the PMA Report at the Classroom Level:

1. Use your KCC code and password to access Stride Academy.
2. Click the "Reports" tab.
3. Click the blue "Generate Real-Time Reports" button.
4. Click "View Reports."
5. From the list of reports which appears, click "Class PMA Report."
6. The defaults on the next screen should be OK as is.
7. Click the red "Apply" button.

The resulting graph will look much the same as the school graph displayed above. Clicking through the remaining pages will reveal data on each student.

(You will notice the graphs show Math, reading, and Science. You will have only Math and Reading.)

Study Shows Positive Impact of Stride on ACT Aspire Scores

The Council for Leaders in Alabama Schools (CLAS) announced the results of a research study related related to Stride. The study, conducted by Auburn University, measured the impact of Stride on ACT Aspire Results.

Here are the key findings:

1. Stride students overall improved math benchmark pass rates by 15% compared to their demographically matched peers who improved pass rate by 8%. 
2. For reading benchmarks, Stride students improved by 10% whereas their peers showed no statistically significant change. 
3. Economically disadvantaged Stride students improved math pass rate by 23% whereas their peers showed no statistically significant change. 
4. Students using Stride who are both African-American and economically disadvantaged improved at a greater rate than their peers for math pass rate (23% vs. 10%) and reading pass rate (18% vs. 13%). 
5. Students in Special Education who used Stride improved reading benchmark pass rate by 57% compared to an improvement of 33% by their matched peers. 

According to the research findings, “the results suggest that the Stride™ program has been successful during the 2015 and 2016 school years in improving academic achievement in targeted schools."

This finding is in accord with a data analysis of the program done in 2011-12 by the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA) which found that students enrolled in the program ‘showed positive results in 8th Grade Math and Reading scores relative to their matched peers’.