I was having a conversation with some co-workers when a statement from one of them created an impromptu head scratching moment for me. I was a bit taken aback and dumbfounded that the co-worker did not feel keeping student data or progress monitoring was important. As I sat there in silence for a few seconds (this truly does not happen to me often) I gathered my collective thoughts and began to ask this individual some questions.
"If you don't progress monitor, how do you know you are meeting the student's goals?" Their reply was
"I just know."
I queried back with
"How do you know?"
"I just do."
I decided to back out of our metaphoric tennis match for a second and instead thought I would attempt my best to educate my friend. I let my opponent know that when I was teaching, even in a life skills setting, taking data and showing my students line or bar graphs of where they were heading was important to me and I made it important to my students as well. Depending on the cognitive level of my students, I would often times teach them how to graph their own data, with built in support so they had some ownership in their own education. As the lines or bars grew in size to support the fact they were indeed making progress, the looks of pride on most of my student's faces was priceless. Students taking their own data was one of my ways of empowering giving them a form of independence.
What about other reasons to progress monitor? The above mentioned one is a pretty strong argument I would say however let's look at it from a different angle. What about from the teaching viewpoint? As a special educator who is in charge of creating new goals for students at least annually, how in the world would one know what to put into the next IEP if they were not progress monitoring?
I view it like a road map. You have your starting goal and hopefully an ending result on the aforementioned goal. In between, you are traveling down this proverbial road to your destination. In between your "road trip," routinely checking to see if you are heading in the right direction? I would think that a good idea. That being said, it is the same thing with students and their goals. Use progress monitoring as a road map so you know if you need to adjust things along the way. Are the students making the types of progress you were hoping? Do you have enough data to support what you are putting into a progress report or report card? How would you know if you were not actively taking data on their work?
This also falls into the same categories when you are looking at behavior or social emotional data. People want to know if the plans are working for the students. Especially when looking at behavior, there is an extreme urgency for parents and staff members to see a quick turn around on positive behavior. If the behavior plans are truly being followed, we have to have supporting data to back up what the plan looks like. Is it working? Has escalated behavior decreased? Is the student functioning at a better rate? The only way to consistently monitor these items is through data collection.
I cannot think of progress monitoring as unimportant. It is an obligation of teachers to keep parents and students updated as to how things are going. I also see it as a way of justifying the IEP. Data and progress monitoring is the best way to ensure you are heading in the right direction with your students and gives you means of changing course if your data does not support your goals. It does take extra time to set up but in the long run it will help you run a very smooth classroom.
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