students measuring their own progress

We were at a faculty meeting and a veteran teacher commented that it wasn't practical to try and measure high school students growth on a graph. This did scare me. We are a special education department. Special education is supposed to be about data collection and analysis to identify what needs work and how successful our interventions are being. My first comment was that I had an algebra student who did not know his multiplication facts. I worked with him every day for about 5 minutes a day on this skill and we graphed the number of facts he could solve in one minute. It was extremely motivating. This student who had said he could never learn the facts was able to solve 60 problems in 1 minute by the end of the year. He saw himself as successful at something as a result of his effort for the first time. It was amazing how his confidence in himself grew. I have had students graph the number of words they can read fluently in a minute, how long it takes to identify the time on 9 clocks and how many vocabulary words they can identify from a unit. Yes, these were all secondary students, from seventh to eleventh grade. No, much of this was not part of the coursework they were doing, but it was important, so I carved time out of our block together to work on it and the students felt successful.

I have been reading Robyn Jackson's Never Work Harder Than Your Students. She reiterated how important students tracking their progress is. This is something that has been cited repeatedly in the literature, and as you noticed, something that my anecdotes bear out as well.  Critics will say that I have done these graphs in resource rooms with small student numbers and it is true. It is not the only way it can be done. Graphing spelling words and math facts is something my teachers had our class do thirty-five years ago. If we want to graph things related to the CCSS then graphs like the one below can be used.

Grade three writing scoring

level	content and analysis
4
3
2
1
0
assignment

level	command of evidence
4
3
2
1
0
assignment

level	coherence, organization, and style
4
3
2
1
0
assignment

level	control of conventions
4
3
2
1
0
assignment

The titles of each section correspond to the areas of evaluation found on the scoring rubric. This could be done for any important area that a rubric exists. It should be considered with activities that will be long lasting. You can see improvement if a writing sample is done twice a quarter. Bar or lines could be used to mark the progress.

Students can see where they are, where they have been and where they need to go. Students can fill them out themselves and track their progress, teachers can look in to see how students are doing in individual areas. This is something that can be done across the curriculum and over the spectrum of grades. Students can focus their learning, teachers can focus their instruction and parents can see the progress that their children make. It can be done. It is an element of good teaching. It doesn't take long for students to complete. We need to invest in ways to improve our instruction. This is a little thing that can mean much more than what is the average of his homework.