DIBELing

Today we had to DIBEL our students. DIBELing is an acronym for something, but basically it is a one minute reading test. The students read a short story for one minute trying to read as many words as they can. After the minute is up they have one minute to tell the teacher everything that they remember from what they read. The students read three different stories and then I average their scores for their final words per minute score. Well, all but five of my students reached the benchmark of 105 words per minutes (in September the benchmark was 95 and by the end of fourth grade it is 118). Two of the five that didn't reach benchmark scored 103 and 104 words per minute (man does that stink or what?). In September I had 11 of my 19 students hitting benchmark, now with the bar raised I have 14.
Now you can take a few things from this. 1. I totally rock at teaching reading (hahahaha yeah right). 2. Realize that most of these students read as quickly as possibly and have no freakin' clue what they read about. 3. Take the test for what it is...another somewhat effect way to measure growth. Did I see the growth in my students? yes, so I'm happy about that. But I now I have to teach the students that reading a bunch of words quickly means absolutely nothing (except when DIBELing) if you can't tell anyone what you just read. Who needs to read for pleasure anyway right?