How many times a year do you progress monitor speech goals? I have to do it 3 times in California and then for the annual IEP. In some states, I have heard of SLPs having to do it 8 times a year! Share in the comments how many times your state/district makes you progress monitor.

Progress reports are like cleaning your bathroom. You know the bathroom needs to be cleaned. Each day you walk past that bathroom thinking about all the germs that have started to build up in that toilet. You want your bathroom to be germ free (who doesn’t!?). But the thought of going in there to clean your bathroom after working all day makes you want to cry. So, you just close the bathroom door and use the guest bathroom for a few days. Then, when you know that you can’t stand the idea of a germy bathroom, you slide on those yellow gloves, get the cleaning supplies out and start scrubbing. While you are cleaning, you think to yourself “if only I cleaned the bathroom last week. I wouldn’t have to be here for 30 minutes deep cleaning everything”.

Who doesn’t want a squeaky clean bathroom all the time!? We just wished someone else would do it for us, right? Progress reports are one of those necessary chores we have to do as speech pathologists. We try to avoid them, but they never go away. As much as I have tried to get better at doing them, I still don’t like them. I know why I have to do them. I see how it can be helpful when communicating with families about their child’s progress. And, it is definitely an important part of tracking the progress my students are making towards their goals. They just take a long time (insert dreadful, complaining face).

Maybe it is my caseload of 55 students that makes it such an unwanted task? Hmmmm….. or maybe it is those students that come to me with goals that I didn’t write, and I am wondering how on earth am I supposed to measure this goal??

Progress Monitor Speech Goals With A Checklist (save your sanity)

To stay organized and make sure I don’t miss a step in the process, I made a progress monitoring checklist. That way if I have a 20 minute opening between therapy groups, I will know exactly where I left off with progress reports. When you are organized with the process, it is easier to navigate. Download the free checklist by clicking the pink button below.

Tips On How To Progress Monitor Speech Goals Efficiently

I have come to accept that progress reports are not going away. In an effort to bring calm to the chaos, I am always in search of strategies to make them feel less overwhelming. I share a lot of my tips on how I progress monitor speech goals efficiently in my blog post HERE.

One of the best strategies I have found to progress monitor speech goals is to write better goals. Taking the time to really think about those areas of need and make sure my goals are S.M.A.R.T. simplifies my therapy planning. It also helps me to take better data in a session. I usually picture my therapy sessions and think about how I am going to take data in a mixed group. When I have more data, I can write up my progress notes a lot easier.

Plan progress monitoring days where you have individual worksheets or activities for everyone in the group. During the session, have each student come work with you, so you can progress monitor any goals that you need.

Resources To Help Progress Monitoring Speech Goals With Ease

Here are some resources I have found to be helpful with progress monitoring :

Read Works has free non-fiction and fictional passages sorted by grade level and even have comprehension questions included for your students working on listening comprehension.

Use rubrics on those therapy days (I like the ones from The Speech Bubble SLP HERE) when trying to manage a group’s behavior–teaching an engaging lesson and writing down data on each student just isn’t going to work.

Invest in progress monitoring tools that will help you collect information about your student’s performance. I use SLPtoolkit (they have some criterion referenced assessments and a daily data feature) and Language Progress Monitoring Tool from Natalie Snyders SLP.  My Data Sheets also help organize your data for lots of different goals, and my Articulation Carryover Activity sets have reading passages as well as structured language activities that are organized by articulation sound to take data on articulation and language.

Here is my FREE Articulation Data Sheet that can help you with progress monitoring students when they are doing tasks that are more conversational or multiple sentences and taking tally data can be cumbersome.

Find resources that have pictures with the skills you need to progress monitor. Put all the tools in a binder for that skill such as pronouns or noun-verb agreement. Then, pull out those tools during progress monitor time to see how your students are doing. I like to administer 5 stimulus items with minimal prompting to see how they work independently. Then, I will add in visual cues/prompts or give answer choices to know exactly where the student is with his/her level of independence.

I really like using my Seasonal vocabulary and grammar BUNDLE to progress monitor goals with my K-2 age group.

What progress monitoring tools do you use in your speech room? Share in the comments with resources and tools that help you with progress monitoring in the comments.