I hope that everyone has had, or is having a tremendous back-to-school experience. Good luck to all as you kick off the 2012-2013 school year. I received a great question last week from an educator in Nevada and wanted to share it with the community, as well as my response. There is flexibility built into our classroom manager, a wonderful tool for organizing students for our instructional initiatives. However that flexibility can also lead to questions about how to appropriately use the tool. Here goes:

Q: When creating a class list do we need to check the box that says “Use this class for Interim Benchmarks”?

A: Depending on what you want to use the “class” for….

Yes, if this is the collection of ALL of the students that have a seat with you during instruction that you will be using to generate codes for or initiate the Benchmark assessment for.

No, if this is a class that is made up of a group of students that you have collected for enrichment or extension activities and you want to be able to push content, or probes to them as a group.

Q: Do we need to create two different class lists, one that has the reading assessment assigned as the benchmark and then another that has the math assessment assigned as the benchmark?

A: Again, assuming that this is a collection of ALL of the students that have a seat with you during instruction, you will need to have a class for reading/ELA and math if you are responsible for testing them in both subjects.