Roots teacher, Samantha Gambino, shares how she uses literacy assessment data to inform small group creation and instruction.

Transcript: Samantha Gambino: for me in particular, reading, everyone gets pulled into a small group because literacy, we try to target in everybody's instruction since it's such a huge like, part of what you do at school. But based on their skill level and where they are is where I realize who I need to pull. So, if you're working on rhyming, I go through your data based on your STEP test, which is the overarching test. And I say, okay, you didn't pass the rhyming part. These four other scholars didn't pass that part either. Let's do a small group poll so that I can get all five of you working together on this one skill. So it's – more so, it's kind of like taking what we know from our assessments and our informal data, and we put it all together and we say okay, these scholars are having this one thing that they're missing. Let's pull them in a group and sort of like, tweak it there into smaller groups. [Interviewer: And it looked like there was some heterogeneous grouping as well?] Yeah, so our whole groups are more based on like, more so like, is everyone able to read in that group? If not, then maybe you should be in a different group. So it's a lot more so like, our groups, A, B, C, and D is what we have right now. C and D are like, first grade groups, mostly. Those are scholars who have the skillsets to do a lot of first grade work. We do have some kindergartners who are in there, too, because they've already passed all of those skills. A and B are mostly our kindergartners right now. Those are scholars who are – they are working on just the kindergarten skills, and we have a couple of first graders who are down there, just based on things that. they need to lift them up to that next like, grade level and things like that.

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