When understanding what your readers need to gain, progress monitoring becomes a daily routine. You need a toolkit of progress monitoring tools at your disposal that is easy to use and gets the job done.
Progress monitoring reading progress isn’t determined by a multiple-choice test or a computerized assessment.
Determining a students’ reading progress is so much more than just numbers on a standardized reading test.
Determining a students’ reading progress is so much more than moving their student id# to the Meets Expectations or Exceeds Expectations category on a data wall or score report.
Determining a students’ reading progress is about...
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knowing where the student is right now
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setting a reasonable goal for improvement
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engaging in specific instructional actions to work at achieving that goal.
When that goal is achieved, set another reasonable goal and the process starts over.
Your readers are giving you a myriad of data every day during independent reading, small group instruction and within those individual conferences.
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Your readers are utilizing engagement tools such as think sheets, post-it notes and graphic organizers during independent reading on which they write quick responses and reactions to text.
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Your readers have probably written longer responses to reading.
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You have probably observed your readers as they engaged in independent reading work to determine their behaviors and attitudes towards reading.
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You have conducted running records (formal and/or informal) for each of your readers. You listen to your readers read.
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You listen to your readers engage in conversations and discussions about the text.
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You track your readers’ levels in reading. While this is not important for your readers to know, you probably keep a tracking chart to see how their reading level increases over time.
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You are conferring with your readers about strategies and skills and how they are applying those within their independent reading.
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Your readers have probably shared with you their reading interests and reflected on their own reading progress and development.
All of these reading interactions with text are DATA! RICH DATA!
RICHER than any standardized test or multiple-choice passage!
This little cheat sheet has guiding questions to use while you are reviewing student reading artifacts for growth and possibilities for improvement.
When you are looking through student work or informal assessment tools it’s important to know what you are looking for.
This little tool provides guiding questions for informally assessing stop and jots about reading, longer written responses, running records, conferring notes, engagement inventories, interest surveys and how readers engage in conversations about books.
I know it sounds simple, just guiding questions, but it was always helpful to have these little thought provokers jotted down in my lesson plan notebook. This little cheat sheet was my answer!
You might be interested in these tools to add to your Progress Monitoring Playbook
