How to Plan Your STAAR Prep Calendar This Spring

February hits and suddenly STAAR is 10 weeks away instead of "sometime in the spring." You've got a pacing guide that technically gets you through the content, a class that's at three different mastery levels, and no real plan for how to shift from teaching new material to making sure what you've taught actually sticks. Every teacher faces this. Most of us cobble something together. Here's a structure that works better than winging it.

This STAAR prep calendar is built around phases, not a day-by-day schedule — because your campus has its own calendar, your class has its own gaps, and you will lose planning periods to assemblies, fire drills, and things that haven't been invented yet. The phases give you a framework for the final eight to ten weeks that flexes when reality hits.

Phase 1: Diagnostic and Prioritization (Weeks 8–10 Before STAAR)

The first thing you need is an honest picture of where your students are. Not a vague sense based on grades — actual data about which reporting categories and specific skills are solid, which are shaky, and which were undertaught.

Run a diagnostic. Use a released STAAR test, a benchmark, or a carefully constructed practice assessment that covers all reporting categories. Score it by reporting category, not just by total points. Then ask: which categories have the most room for improvement, and which skills within those categories are responsible for most of the wrong answers?

This phase is also when you identify the students who are closest to the passing standard — the ones who need three to five more correct answers to pass. These students respond fastest to targeted intervention and are worth knowing by name before you even start prep.

Action step: After your diagnostic, create a priority list: the three to five skills that account for the most missed questions across your class. These become the backbone of your prep calendar. Everything else is secondary.

Phase 2: Targeted Reteach (Weeks 5–8 Before STAAR)

This is your main instructional window. You're not introducing brand-new content — you're revisiting skills that were taught, did not stick for enough students, and need a different approach the second time through.

The word "reteach" gets used loosely. It doesn't mean show the same notes and work the same problems again. It means teaching the same concept from a different angle: a different model, a different application, a different level of complexity. If the first teach was procedural, the reteach should be conceptual. If the first teach was conceptual, the reteach should be more applied and problem-based.

Structure this phase around your priority skills from Phase 1. Don't try to cover everything equally — that's how you end up doing a surface-level touch on 20 skills and doing justice to none of them. Go deep on your top three, and spiral your next three through bell ringers and exit tickets without pulling full instructional time away from your priority skills.

Action step: Map each week of Phase 2 to one or two specific skills. Write it on a calendar, even a rough one. When an assembly or a fire drill eats your planning period and you lose a day, the map tells you what still needs to happen and what you can compress.

Phase 3: Mixed Practice and Stamina Building (Weeks 3–5 Before STAAR)

At some point — and earlier than most teachers do it — you need to stop adding new instructional content and shift to mixed practice under test-like conditions. This is Phase 3.

The reason this shift is important: students who only practice isolated skills don't develop the test-taking endurance or the skill-switching ability the STAAR demands. The test doesn't label questions by reporting category. It mixes everything. Students need practice choosing which skill applies to which problem — not just executing a skill they've been cued to use.

In this phase, run full practice sections at least twice a week. Review the results not just with correct answers but with process: "How did you approach this problem? What made you choose that strategy? Where did your reasoning go wrong?" That conversation is where the learning happens.

This is also when stamina becomes a real concern. STAAR is long. Students who've only practiced in 15-minute chunks will fade in the second half. Build up to 45–60 minute practice sessions so the test length isn't a surprise on test day.

Action step: Schedule at least two full-section practice sessions per week during Phase 3. For one of them, commit to full test conditions — no pausing to explain, no hints. Save the review for after. Your students need the experience of pushing through difficulty without a teacher lifeline.

Phase 4: Consolidation (Weeks 1–3 Before STAAR)

In the final two to three weeks, most of the heavy instructional lifting is done. You're not going to introduce a new concept and have students master it in 10 days. What you can do is consolidate what students already know, shore up weak spots that respond to quick targeted practice, and get students into the right mental state for the test.

This is the phase where bell ringers earn their keep. A five-item mixed review at the start of class — pulling from your priority skills — keeps everything warm without consuming full instructional periods. Exit tickets confirm what stuck and what needs one more pass before you stop.

Stop introducing anything new in the final two weeks. Anything you teach cold in the last 10 days will not stick reliably, and it may shake students' confidence in the things they do know. If it's not already in their repertoire, it's not going to be there on test day.

Action step: Write a list of everything you're still tempted to teach before the test. For each item, ask honestly: can my students gain reliable mastery of this in two weeks alongside everything else? The answer is almost always no — and naming that is not giving up, it's good planning.

Phase 5: Test Week

The week of the test is not the time for intensive review. Your students' brains need rest, not cramming. A brief mixed review keeps things warm. Confidence matters — students who walk into the test believing they've prepared well perform better than students who feel like they've been drowning in content they never fully understood.

Keep it brief, calm, and routine. The same bell ringer structure they've been doing for weeks. A conversation about what they know, not anxiety about what they might not know. And be specific — tell them what they're actually good at. Not "you've got this" platitudes, but "you've gotten much stronger on paired passages, you know how to show your work on open-ended questions, you've been hitting the volume problems consistently." Concrete confidence beats generic encouragement every time.

Action step: Write five specific things your class has genuinely improved at during prep. Tell them those five things the morning before the test. Specificity is what makes it land.

The Mistake That Derails Every Prep Calendar

The single biggest mistake in STAAR prep planning is starting Phase 2 too late and running out of time before Phase 3. When that happens, you end up doing intensive reteach until the week before the test — and your students never get the mixed practice and stamina work they need to perform well on a long, demanding assessment.

I've done this. I taught new content until three weeks out, ran two rushed practice tests, and watched students make mistakes in the second half of the real test that they never would have made on their own time. The content was fine. The endurance wasn't there.

Protect Phase 3. Mark it on your calendar now and treat it as non-negotiable. If Phase 2 doesn't go as planned — and it won't — compress your reteach rather than stealing from your practice time.

If you need STAAR-aligned practice materials organized by reporting category and grade level, the TestPrepGrow content library makes it easy to pull exactly the skill practice you need for each phase without building everything from scratch in the middle of prep season.

Plan the phases. Protect the calendar. Give your students the time to practice — not just the content they need to know.