Monday, March 30, 2009

How Can Galileo Assist in Interventions?

As I interacted with school districts during the Intervention Forum, a number of people wanted to know exactly how Galileo could assist educators with interventions. You already know Galileo provides assessment data which is broken down by standard. It allows educators to see which students have made progress and which students still need additional instruction. While this information helps to identify which students may need additional help, the more challenging task is finding content to use in an intervention. Galileo not only helps identify and group students for you, but Galileo suggests Instructional Dialogs that can be used in your re-teaching initiatives.


The Risk Level report on the Benchmark Results page will group a class of students based on how at-risk the student is for not passing the state assessment. You will want to identify the group of students that you would like to expose to an intervention: High Risk, Moderate Risk, Low Risk or On Course students.


Once you have identified a group of students to work with, you will be presented with an intervention strategy for that group of students. Galileo will organize all of the standards tested into steps for re-teaching. Determine which instructional step you’d like to focus on. Then click on the Assignments button to see recommended Instructional Dialogs for each of the state standards that make up that step of the intervention strategy.





The Dialogs listed are links, so you can preview the lesson and see if it is something you’d like to use with the group of students. Teachers have implemented Dialogs by having students do them online, they have given students hand-held responders to use as they presented the Dialog, and teachers have simply presented the Dialog and have asked students to verbally respond. Notice as you preview a Dialog, each one has a quiz or a formative assessment attached. This quiz is meant to help teachers determine if students learned the standard during the intervention.

If you see a Dialog you’d like to use with students, just continue scrolling down the page and complete the online form to schedule the Dialog.



You are now ready to proceed with your intervention. As you can see, Galileo automatically links assessment data to instruction. Your benchmark data assesses the instruction that has occurred. You can run and analyze reports broken down by individual standards and individual students to determine what students need help with. You can then group students and assign already-made instructional Dialogs to aid in re-teaching students. And finally, to ensure students have learned the content of a re-teaching intervention, there is a follow-up quiz or formative assessment that can be administered automatically to students.
Have you had a chance to use or implement Dialogs? Tell us about the experience.

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