Progress Monitoring and Writing
Posted by Marsha on December 17, 2011
Too often the only time we assess writing is when it is time for a school, district or state writing assessment. These assessments have their place, but the lessons learned from them don’t always lead to immediate instructional changes. It is important that writing teachers learn how to monitor students’ writing progress daily.
In order to monitor progress, one must have a measurable target. This starts in the planning phase of any lesson. By determining your target skills or mini-lessons, you’ve provided yourself with the measurable target to use to monitor progress.
After teaching a target skill, the best way to monitor progress is through informal observations made during independent writing time or conference time of daily writing workshop. Either way, the key to making the task of monitoring progress easy is having a record keeping systems in place so that you can quickly jot down observations, comments and instructional “notes to self”. For example, overlap and tape index cards to a clipboard leaving 1/4 inch exposed to write students’ names. The clip board is portable and makes it easy to keep notes as well as retrieve notes for parent conferences. When an index card fills up, replace it with a new one but keep the old one in the student’s file for future reference. Another easy record keeping system uses an old fashioned seating chart. Simply every time you visit a student. This quick visual helps you keep track of whose work you have seen and who you have not. Couple this with a comment sheet that is kept in each students’ writing notebook; where you date and comment, creating a running record of entries.
Students can be a part of monitoring their own progress. Goal sheets with scales and comment column are an effective way to hold students accountable for their progress and engaged in their education. Plus these goal sheets can be used as records as well!
We can’t wait for testing situations to assess where our are as writers and to determine the direction of our instruction. To create proficient writers, we must monitor their progress and adjust our instruction frequently.
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