Monitor and Improve Comprehension
Your work during student practice is active, not passive (as tempting as it may be to think otherwise, remember: this is not
your break time). Student practice consists of both Individual and Group Practice.
Individual Practice includes the following examples:
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Independent journal writing
Silent sustained reading (SSR) during which everyone, including the teacher, reads a book of his or her choice.
Individual student practice of various skills (math, science, etc.).
Learning centers
Group practice includes the following examples:
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Combinations of pairs, triads, quads, etc.
Cooperative group work
The vast majority of student practice will occur during the designated guided and independent practice sessions. (It might
be helpful for you to remind yourself of the purposes of the guided and independent practice components of the lesson
cycle.) One of your major responsibilities during these parts of your lesson is to monitor student practice to accomplish the
following (detailed in the table below):
Make sure students are on task
Pay attention to the quality of student responses
Offer clarification and extend understanding
Gauge your coverage and improve your efficiency to monitor as many students as possible
Maximize the use of classroom assistants
Tips on effectively managing assistants and aids
Determine (in a global way) “Is this working?”
Monitor student practice to:
Make sure students are on
task
Individual Practice:
Circulate around the room, lean over students’ shoulders and kneel by their desks to
carefully examine their work, using proximity to be an active and visible presence.
Students should have no doubt that you are monitoring them. Praise students who are
working hard, set and enforce time-limits, and implement consequences as necessary.
During Guided Practice, ensure that all students have an opportunity to practice. Don’t
allow one student to serve as a representative for the entire class, leaving the rest of the
students without adequate engagement with the material (which invites misbehavior). Ask
for volunteers to participate, but be mindful of what the others do in the meantime.
Example
Group Practice:
Monitor effective collaboration. Observe whether students are working effectively with
peers—listening to each other, overseeing each other’s behavior to ensure they remain on
task, and maximizing each other’s talents and contributions. Cooperative small group
learning consists of complex procedures, behaviors, and norms of communication that
you must establish and teach students in order to facilitate functional groups. (If such
grouping is a regular feature of the classroom, teaching and reinforcing these norms
should be considered in E-5 (“Implement and Practice Time-Saving Procedures”).
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Pay attention to the quality
of student responses
Monitor the quality of student work to gauge degree of comprehension.
Individual:
Seize the opportunity to observe individual student progress and to tailor assistance.
Enable students to progress at their own pace on a class-wide learning objective. Push
students’ thinking since they will be exposed to fewer competing viewpoints.
During Guided Practice, actively examine student work and student thinking. Monitor
errors, by silently noting the errors and then correcting the errors aloud for all students to
hear, before attempting more complex problems. Ask questions, scaffolding them to
gauge the degree of comprehension; take notes on student performance (using a
clipboard?); fully engage students.
During Independent Practice, circulate around the room, lean over students’ shoulders
and kneel by their desks to carefully examine their work.
One Teacher’s Approach
Groups:
Determine if each student has mastered the objective. Don’t rely on group output to reflect
individual learning. The group must be accountable for achieving its goals and each
member must be accountable for contributing his or her share of the work. Formally and
informally assess the performance of each group member as well as the entire group by
having students complete a form outlining exactly how they contributed and giving
individual tests on the objectives.
For key techniques to use in formative assessment of your class during student practice,
click here: Check for understanding
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Tips on monitoring student use of learning centers
Offer clarification and
extend understanding
Answer student questions, provide assistance, and re-explain key concepts/ideas as
necessary. Harvest teachable moments for both the individual and group. When an
individual raises a question that might be pertinent for the whole class, consider stopping
the activity to share both the question and the response.
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More on responding instructively
Gauge your coverage and
improve your efficiency to
monitor as many students
as possible
Individual:
Don’t use all of your time with just a handful of students. Appoint students to field
questions while the teacher holds meetings. Instruct students to write down questions to
ask the teacher later.
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Groups:
Don’t use all of your time with just one or two groups. Appoint one representative in each
group to collect and bring/present the whole group’s questions to you.
Maximize the use of
classroom assistants
You may have a full or part-time assistant or aide in the classroom during student
practice. Having help can be a fantastic opportunity to improve your effectiveness—or it
can detrimentally complicate your guided and independent practice sessions. The
difference lies predominantly with how strategically and deliberately you direct your
assistant.
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Tips on effectively managing assistants and aids
Determine (in a global way)
“Is this working?”
Read your audience. In real-time execution, is the activity working as you envisioned? Will
it lead your students to mastery of the objective? If everyone is doing what they are
supposed to be doing, is it all working as planned, or are there tweaks you could make to
improve its effectiveness?
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More on adjusting as needed
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Example
Not So Effective: “Carmen, come up to the board and complete these division problems. Everybody watch!”
Effective: “Everyone, use your mini dry-erase boards to answer number seven. Raise your hands when you’re done. If
you finish early, check your work by multiplying…”
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One Teacher’s Approach
“In order to check for ALL students’ understanding, I spent a lot of time during independent practice walking around the
room with a clipboard to find out which students were demonstrating mastery and which were not. I would take notes on
students’ work, ask them to explain how they were approaching the work and why, and re-teach individuals or small
groups as needed.”
Jane Henzerling (Phoenix ’98)
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Monitoring Use of Learning Centers:
Ensure that student work in learning centers is productive. Monitor whether learning actually occurs and provide constant
feedback. If used properly, centers enable students to work at their own pace on:
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enrichment (to deepen understanding),
skill development (to practice new skills)
exploration (to incorporate student interest or encourage discovery)
Ensure students are able to accomplish the work independently or with the help of peers.
Review what students learned and did at each center in order to reinforce the key skills and concepts. That might involve
spending brief time with each student while they are at the center; taking time at some later point to review what was
learned at each center with the whole class; or periodically alluding to the center activity in relevant future lessons.
More on creating efficient procedures for learning centers can be found in this part of the P-6 page.
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Purposes of Guided and Independent Practice
In general, teaching procedural knowledge entails the following three phases (the last two are the practice components of
the 5-step lesson plan):
Guided and Independent Practice in the Lesson Plan
Introduction to New
Material
Analogy: A friend shows you how to ride a bike
Model, demonstrate, illustrate and explain by providing a set of steps, tactics or rules. Make
your modeling as engaging as possible.
More on introductions to new material
Guided Practice
Analogy: A friend holds the bike steady as you pedal
The Guided Practice stage provides students with an opportunity to practice the skill or process
while you demonstrate the steps and monitor student practice. It is where teachers share the
reins – gauging student practice of the new material and clarifying steps and points. Lead
guided practice to help shape procedural knowledge. It is in this phase when students typically
make errors and experience some anxiety or frustration. Students, expected to master the skills
and the scenes, are actively involved in practicing.
Guided practice comes in many forms: teacher questioning, sample problems, graphic
organizers, concept webs, recitations, summaries, and the review of mnemonic devices. When
dealing with knowledge objectives, the Guided Practice may be the time for students to put
away their notes, attempt to recall the facts or concepts taught, or work with the ideas they’ve
been taught in a slightly new way. When practicing skill-based objectives, such as math facts or
grammatical corrections, teachers may provide a series of practice problems. It may occur
individually, in small groups or as a whole class.
Internalizing
through
Independent
Practice
Analogy: You ride the bike yourself
Students refine their skills, without teacher aid in order to demonstrate their mastery of the
objective.
Independent Practice may involve: solving problems, answering questions, demonstrating a
skill, completing a “performance task” (an experiment, role-play, debate, report, song, poem,
skit, project) or applying the knowledge in some new way (such as developing a new analogy or
metaphor) to demonstrate mastery.
By the end of Independent Practice, students should be able to achieve the objective that you
set at the beginning of the period. Through practice and drill, the skill becomes habitual. For
students who easily achieve the objective or for those who continue to struggle, extension
activities and homework assignments are two ways to get students to further engage with the
material they learned.
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Tips for Managing Assistants and Aides During Student Practice
Teach your assistant
how to add value to
your practice sessions.
Don’t assume that your assistant will automatically know your expectations. Be prepared to
both articulate these expectations and to specifically train your assistant in the role you
envision (for both ongoing practice routines and for lesson-specific activities). Detail what you
would like done, how you would like it done, the rationale for doing it that way and what it
looks like when it is done that way. Provide frequent feedback, including both areas of
strength, and room for growth.
Invest your assistant in
your short-term and
long-term goals for
practice sessions and
for individual students
during these sessions.
Make sure your assistant fully understands the objective of each practice session so she can
more productively assist your efforts. Inform your assistant of which specific students he or
she should plan to closely monitor, and what specific assistance you would like emphasized.
Debrief with your assistant following the activity to update your knowledge of student progress,
and to give your assistant an opportunity to give input on what is working well and what needs
improvement from his/her perspective.
Provide your assistant
with clearly defined
tasks during practice
sessions.
1. Put him in charge of a particular center where he can review, drill, or extend student skills.
2. Ask her to work with students who were absent, helping them to complete missed
assignments.
3. Provide him with a list of students to target during Guided and/or Independent practice,
checking that they follow directions and grasp the material (this is especially helpful during
times of whole group instruction).
4. Ask him to work with students who finish their work early. Manipulative activities that help
apply and extend the learned skill can be enjoyable for the assistant and productive for
the student.
5. During small group activities, ask him to focus on one or two groups (vary the level of
students he works with – he shouldn’t just interact with “low” or “high” group).
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