Setting Gaurantees and Focusing on Them

-What We Teach
I have been a long time proponent of establishing academic guarantees in every grade level and using those guarantees as the basis of common formative assessments and interventions.... a long term, back-to-basics, common instructional goal. When I first started using CFA's, RTI and attending PLC meetings (years ago in another school and system) we meet as a grade level and established one essential and critical math and reading guarantee for every student in the grade. For example in September we established that every first grader should know the first 100 Dolch sight words by December; we then pretested and came up with an instructional plan based on the results. The lowest students went to Title I and RTI. We made flashcards (using labels and index cards) for the bottom and middle groups; the bottom group was pulled out student by student by the teaching assistant for 5 minutes everyday to review the flashcards.  We also made basic sight word books and sentences for the bottom and middle groups. Those books were sent home, reviewed during RTI and Title I and used as independent readers both with the instructional assistant and parent volunteers.   We re-tested the students every 3-4 weeks to monitor progress and realign groups. A simple check list was sent home to parents to let them know what words had been mastered and what did needed to be practiced. At the end of our goal period we gave a final assessment and if I remember correctly the pass rate was about 90%.  Imagine if almost every first grader knew the first one hundred Dolch words by Christmas!!