I have started the process… I have my goals, and I’m working with my kids….what am I missing?
If this is you, you have come to the right spot! You are well on your way to being a progress monitoring guru at this point! (Maybe you don’t feel like it yet, but trust me, you are doing great!)
The next step in the progress monitoring adventure is….take a deep breath and don’t cry…..data.
Hate Data?
I used to, but not anymore! Now, well, honestly, it isn’t my favorite thing to do, but it definitely IS in my top 10 for teachers tasks….want to know how it got there? Read the post Meet My Friend Data, then head back here for some next steps.
All caught up? Yeah, Data and I had a rocky start, but every day we learn to better help the kids….anyway…..Data and progress monitoring go hand-in-hand….which is part of why administrators often-times think they are the same thing.
Not entirely clear on what progress monitoring is, or how to get started? I have defined it for you in What is Progress Monitoring? and given specific steps to get started in: 5 Steps to Begin Effective Progress Monitoring.
So, here we are: 3 or 4 weeks deep into this mess and somebody (let’s be honest, it was that annoying RTI coach wasn’t it?) wants to see your data for progress monitoring…and you pull out all those papers you’ve been carefully writing scores and information on…..and that somebody looked at you like you were crazy….oh…that didn’t happen to you?….ummm…well…yeah that happened to me….once….and I vowed it would never happen again. (SUPER embarrassing by the way)
I am not the most organized teacher…or organized at all…but you would never know it by looking at my data!
Now, after 10 years in this business, I have my data collection sheets ready to go, but more importantly….
About 9 years ago, I started playing around with Excel to track my progress monitoring data. I figured out how to make graphs and write formulas, and one of my best tools was developed out of that….Haha! I say developed like it was a beautiful, gentle process….nope. I made countless spreadsheets, and messed up on the numbers and formatting sooo many times. For at least a year, I cursed Excel, but my husband told me to get over myself and helped me figure it out….He was my boyfriend at the time…now, that would never work….he has spoiled me too much…..Yet, in the end, all that work paid off. I now have a spreadsheet system I use to progress monitor (meaning graph data) for my kids… It works wonderfully to streamline the process for me.
I input in the information, and it is graphed for me. I even got all fancy and made a progress report page. That way I could report progress data to admin or parents on specific goals. This has been a huge time-saver for me!
Don’t want to spend hours (years in my case) like I did creating this from scratch? Take a look at it below. The comments speak for themselves.
If you are feeling creative, and want to make something similar, I suggest you start playing around in Excel to see what the program can do. There are lots of tutorials out there, though I will admit that I did find them confusing and had to adapt what I saw presented to what I wanted.
Whichever path you choose….having my progress monitoring data graphed automatically has been a HUGE time saver for me, especially when sharing the progress with parents and admin.
Not sure Excel works for you?
I have also made these data tracking forms to help with keeping a handle on all of the goal tracking data for students with special needs in one easy-to-use-technology-free format.
My biggest suggestion: Put in your data weekly so that it is always pretty current. That way you never get caught off guard (like I did) with the “What does the data look like?” question.