Using a progress monitoring tool transcript

Elaine Stanley:

Using a progress monitoring tool will help you diagnose gaps in student learning. It will ideally help you identify students that need intervention as well. It really helps you gauge the pace of instruction and how students are coping with the pace that you're working at and whether you can speed up because they're going really well, or you need to slow down the pace and give them more practice, repeated practice with concepts.

Also, the data you get from the progress monitoring tool is really useful for writing individual education plans, which teachers are really thinking about this time of year as well, and setting those timely needs-specific goals. It can really help you identify areas of need for students.

What is the tool? It's a tool designed to track students' developing phonics knowledge and skills over time. It's an ongoing assessment. It's formative, so it gives you information about next point-of-need for students. And it's summative, it will tell you how they've gone with a particular phase that you've worked on.

When would you use the progress monitoring tool? At the end of each phase in a progression. The example we are going to show is aligned to the Literacy Hub progression, but there's also a blank template you could use for any progression that you are following.

Here’s the suite of resources in our progress monitoring tool. You've got student materials, you've got the teacher marking sheet, and you've got the spreadsheets where you enter all the data. You can find all of these, the whole suite of resources, on the topic four webpage in the resources section. We'll also put the link in the chat for the blank template as well that you can use for your own progression.

https://www.literacyhub.edu.au/search/progress-monitoring-tool-template/

All right. We are going to start with Phase 1. You can see here we've got the student material; it shows the letter–sound correspondences for each phase, then there's some words to read, some sentences to read, and then there will be some words to spell and sentences to spell as well. All right, so we're going to get into that. I'm going to demonstrate marking the sheet as we go.

Teacher:

I'd like you to use your letters and sounds. We're going to start at the top there. Can you tell me the sound for each letter?

Student:

/s/, /a/, /t/, /b/, /i/, /n/.

Teacher:

Now we're going to read those words, so use our letters and sounds.

Student:

/a/, /t/, at; /i/, /n/, in; /t/, /a/, /p/, tap; /s/, /i/, /b/, sib; /a/, /n/, /t/, ant.

Elaine Stanley:

Now we'll keep going and imagine Kerrie would keep going. She's got some pseudo words there to use her letters and sounds for. There's just a couple of mistakes there. She's really good at reading her irregular words. Imagine we've done that first sentence, and now we're going to read that second sentence.

Teacher:

If you can use your letters and sounds to read that one, Kerrie.

Student:

/t/, /i/, /p/, tip. Tip is /i/, /n/, in. Tip is in the /b/, /i/, /t/, bit. Tip is in the bit.

Elaine Stanley:

Then, we would keep going with the last sentence to read, and some words to write on her whiteboard and her irregular words. She's really good at doing those. Imagine we've done that first sentence for writing and now we're on the second one.

Teacher:

Kerrie, this is your sentence I'd like you to write. Can you repeat it back to me? The ant is tan.

Student:

The ant is tan.

Teacher:

All right. Off you go when you're ready.

Student:

The ant, the ant is, the ant is, the ant is tan.

Teacher:

Well done. Okay.

Elaine Stanley:

You would keep going through the assessment like that. Then once complete, you'll enter the student's data on to the spreadsheet.

This is what the spreadsheet looks like. There are instructions for use with a scoring guide and admin advice. There's a new tab for each phase and there's actually five spreadsheets in all. The phases are split across five spreadsheets.

For Kerrie's data, I would input all the scores for each section. The spreadsheet is conditionally formatted for you. It will put in your percentages. If there's 80% correct in each section or above, it will colour-code green. And if it's below, it's red. So you know if the student's really reached that good understanding and application at that 80% level.

For Kerrie, very quickly, because I want to move along to questions, I can see there's some sound confusion between /p/ and /b/, and that's affecting some of her work at the word and sentence level and also some /n/ and /m/ confusion. So we'd follow up with some sound discrimination tasks there to really embed those different sounds. And because they're so similar sounding, we might even think about checking hearing as well because that could be an issue that's interfering there.

In topic five, in our next live session, we're going to fill in a whole class data set for progress monitoring, and really look at a Response to Intervention model with your data to see how you can really pick out how you need to cater to your whole grade, and their next point in learning, but also specific groups of students and what they need.

https://register.gotowebinar.com/recording/1769384022501843373