Progress Monitoring Made Easy
Isn’t that what we are all looking for?
Progress monitoring doesn’t have to be nearly as hard as it has been made out to be! Progress monitoring SHOULD be easy!
There is a huge emphasis on “doing” progress monitoring, but teachers are left to their own devices to figure out how. For information about how to get started with progress monitoring, check out my blog post: 5 Steps to Begin Effective Progress Monitoring. It’s cool, I’ll still be here when you get back 🙂
Alright, so you know how to begin, but WHAT DO I DO???? I need a “Progress Monitoring Made Easy for Dummies” guide! Well, if this is you, you’re in the right spot!
I have been “doing progress monitoring” for 11 years, and I have it down pretty well by now. I’m not perfect, but I’m more than glad to show you how you can do it without wasting a lot of time and energy.
Streamline your process to make progress monitoring easy.
I cannot say this enough….if you want your progress monitoring to be easy, you HAVE to set yourself up for success! Do not wait until you have all of your students and goals in front of you then start ripping your hair out trying to figure out how to progress monitor all of it!
Here is how I started the year streamlined, and made my life so much easier!
First, check out your grade level standards and talk to teachers in your grade level. You will quickly see patterns to what the students struggle with. If you are younger grades, guaranteed the kids will be struggling with beginning reading skills, and beginning math skills. If you are working with older students, vocabulary and fluency will be huge for math and reading.
With these thoughts in our minds, start gathering materials that you could use to progress monitor your students on the areas you are pretty sure will be weaknesses. For example, collect letter and number cards that you could use to “flash” to students to assess them during your progress checks. Years ago, I made my own set of letter flash cards with the corresponding data tracking sheets to easily track letters and letter sounds.You can check them out here to see what I did.
The key to progress monitoring made easy is versatility
By this, I mean, any materials that you collect should be versatile enough to be used to assess any goal that you create for that subject area. If you checked out my letter and letter sound product above, you saw that I could use those materials to progress monitor ANY goal regarding identifying letters OR letter sounds.
Over the years, I have progress monitored many MANY goals. Instead of creating assessments which were created to only monitor one goal, I created items which could be used across many goals. I reduced my workload tremendously through this process.. Have a goal regarding fluency? I pull out my trusty fluency progress monitoring files and I can pull out the reading level I need. Graph that data! Then I put my fluency assessment back for the next student who needs it. That next student may be in my class this year, or three years from now. It won’t matter because fluency is fluency.
****Special note here**** I do NOT change my goals to fit my assessments, I have worked long and hard to make my assessments versatile enough to use for many goals. When I come across a funky goal that doesn’t fit easily, I re-evaluate how I could make my progress monitoring assessments better fit a wider range of goals.
I truly believe that the worst thing we can do, while progress monitoring, is make assessments geared specifically for one goal.
Teachers simply do not have this kind of time on their hands! I know I don’t! I have WAY too many IEPs to write, progress reports to send home, behavior contracts to check, and evaluations to schedule/write/report to parents. I do NOT have time to create specialized assessments for every goal on my caseload!
I’ll admit, my first year of teaching, man I tried! I tried so hard to make assessments for every different goal. I worked so hard to find items I could use to monitor that fit the goal perfectly and as many hours as I put in, I never got everything done. That was before I had a husband….and kids….and needed more than 3 hours of sleep in a night. Now, I’ve got way too much on my plate to spend all of my waking hours doing school work, ESPECIALLY creating assessments! Anybody with me?
So, I created some resources, which are linked below for you to look at to see how I did it. These resources and assessments I have used for years to make my progress monitoring an easy process. Check them out to see how I did it and still do it!
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