DIBELS

First and foremost, I feel that being provided the opportunity to participate in and receive DIBELS training is something that was very beneficial to my contract and myself. I learned so much about the system and Oral Reading Fluency. It was nice to also take what I learned with me to observe and visit Mylan Park, a Title I school.

During my hours, I had the opportunity to work with four different classrooms of students. I also DIBELed a few students from other classrooms because they were absent during other times of benchmarking in the week.

From this experience, I learned how DIBELing goes into the placement of students. I learned that students that are in 'the red' are considered the 'at risk' students. But something that I thought of during this experience was what if something was going on with child the day that he/she was being DIBELed. What if the student hadn't had breakfast and when is lunch was what was going through this student's mind? I worked with some students that seemed completely uninterested in what was going on. These students didn't even want to look at me, let alone read to me. What does this do to their DIBELS results?

Overall, I feel that DIBELing is something that is great and beneficial in relation to benchmarking, but at the same time, I wonder how the results can be misread or have a negative effect on students. I believe that based on what I mentioned above, there have to be students that are misread and marked based on what is going on in their life outside of school that causes them to be distracted, which in turn causes their results to be low...