3 Tips to Making Prepping for Progress Monitoring Easier
Progress monitoring gets a bad rap.
Let’s face it - as soon as the words progress monitoring are uttered, it evokes some sort of panic or sends our nervous system spiraling.
Most teachers view progress monitoring as just another labor-intensive, time-sucking task that needs to be completed. But progress monitoring is SO powerful. When you harness its power, you’ll be better equipped to meet the needs of your students.
That’s why I’m going to share my favorite hacks to make prepping for progress monitoring a breeze.
Progress Monitoring Prepping Tips
Progress monitoring is a way for teachers to monitor student performance over a given amount of time.
If your school district utilizes the intervention frameworks of Response to Intervention (RTI) or Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS), then chances are you’re already familiar with progress monitoring, but in need of ways to streamline the process.
If your district doesn’t use one of these frameworks, no biggie! You can still utilize these strategies to set up your own progress monitoring system.
Tip #1: Set Clear Goals
Before you even start progress monitoring students, you need to set clear goals. When you start with the end in mind, it makes creating the pathway to reach a goal so much smoother.
Here are some things to consider:
Set clear, attainable goals for and with your students, giving students a chance to take ownership of their learning.
Ensure that targeted interventions align with literacy standards. Reviewing your assessment data, and looking for standards that are missed, can help you choose targeted interventions that also address grade-level standards.
Meet with interventionists consistently. To make sure you see continued growth in your students, it’s imperative that you keep in constant contact with the reading interventionist in your school. A word of caution… interventionists DO NOT introduce new literacy skills to students. They are ONLY responsible for REVIEWING predetermined targeted standards. Letting interventionists know which standards have been introduced during whole-group instruction can point them towards standards and skills that can be reviewed, or what standards students have not yet or are close to mastering.
Tip #2: Plan
“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
Failing to plan is the number one cause of inadequate interventions.
It’s best if there’s a school-wide intervention plan in place, but if your school doesn’t, then you need to make a plan for scheduling student interventions into your day - INCLUDING setting aside time to administer progress monitoring assessments.
More often than not, time is not set aside to assess students, causing it to be given last minute (if at all).
Set aside at least 3 to 5 days (depending on the size of your class) to monitor students progress.
You want to make sure that you’re monitoring student performance consistently between benchmark assessments. Check to see if your school has scheduled progress monitoring cycles, if not, I recommend monitoring your students’ progress at least every 2 to 4 or 6 to 8 weeks.
Tip #3: Use Various Data Points
Your progress monitoring assessments DO NOT have to be the same as your beginning-of-the-year benchmark assessments.
Remember, benchmark assessments are universal screeners and are used at the start of the school year to identify students who could potentially struggle with reading and also to determine initial reading levels.
Diagnostic assessments are used to diagnose (if you will) areas of deficit and identify specific supports needed. Progress monitoring assesses ONLY skills that have been introduced or are the specific skills that are areas of concern for the student.
For instance, if your student scored below the grade-level standard in reading CVC (consonant vowel consonant) short vowel words, then you’d monitor that specific skill by assessing the student every 2 to 4 weeks until they have mastered the standard.
Or, if your student needs to work on letter identification, then you use a letter recognition assessment to monitor the progress of their intervention.
Over time, the multiple data points you’ve collected can be analyzed to celebrate student growth and create a plan for targeted interventions.
Easy-to-Use Progress Monitoring Tools
Implementing these three tips will take that once overwhelming task of progress monitoring and make it way more manageable and give you back some time (which we could always use more of!).
And, to help you streamline progress monitoring even more, check out my Alphabet Arc Letter Recognition Assessment to monitor student progress.
This ready-to-use - just print and go - resource is easy to implement and will provide you with the data you need to support the growth of your students.
And, for more reading intervention resources, check out my TPT Store.
Good Luck!
Shannon
