Self-Monitoring: Part 2

Today I attended the second day of FIP Your School training.  You can learn more about my first self-monitoring experience here.

At this second day of training, we talked more about what formative instructional practices look like, how to share this information with our teams and how to help all teachers be effective.

My experience with my students self-monitoring their learning has been very positive.  I learned a few more things I would like to try after today.  One of them was really getting students to own their learning across the board.  I have found it easy to incorporate focus statements and self-assessment into math but am struggling in Langauge Arts. I think part of this is because we cover so much material in a day in Langauge Arts (or at least it seems like more).

One thing I did in math was take the items from our short cycle assessment (9 week assessment) and put posters on the closet with each skill at the top.  When students feel that they have mastered the skill, they sign up for me to assess them in a more formal way (as prescribed by our grade-level assessment).

I had a proud teacher moment when the majority of those signed up where correct; they were ready!  As I assess each child, I use a marker to cross their name off on the chart.  Students are free to sign up in the morning or other times throughout the day when I am not directly instructing (breakfast, dismissal, etc).

My next goal is to better incorporate this into Langauge Arts and to consistently use focus statements in each Language Arts component.

Do your students self-monitor?  If so, how?  What did you do to make focus statements an automatic part of your day?