Tips for Teachers: Monitoring in the Classroom

Monitoring is the assessment of students in order to ensure students are progressing properly. It is a highly valuable tool for teachers to use for many reasons. Primarily, teachers need to monitor students in order to gauge student receptivity during a lesson. Teachers are also able to use monitoring to check for advancement toward the goals for long-term instruction. In addition, monitoring is useful for helping teachers decide what works and what doesn't work in regards to their instructional procedures (Hofmeister & Lubke, 1999).

There are many ways that a teacher can monitor development in the classroom. It is essential that teachers check the students' comprehension all throughout and after each lesson. This can be accomplished by monitoring. Circulating all through the classroom in order to observe student work is a good way to monitor student progress and understanding. While circulating, teachers can help students who request assistance.
However, it is important for teachers to check on every student, not just those who ask for help. This will allow the teacher to allocate time for assessing all students. Goal-setting is another essential part of academic success. The teacher is responsible for helping students set goals and monitoring them in order to ensure that students are on track (Hofmeister & Lubke, 1999).

In my classroom, I plan to implement a strategic monitoring plan in order to assess students and myself. This monitoring plan consists of four different areas; monitoring goals, providing for timely monitoring, decision making and corrective action, and improvement of instruction. Below is my proposed monitoring action plan.

Example Classroom Monitoring Plan

Monitoring Goals

a. Establish practical standards that include due dates.

b. Do not deviate from due dates unless it is completely necessary. For example, if a concept is not grasped by the majority of the class and re-teaching is necessary, it may not be plausible to enforce a due date that falls during the re-teaching period.