13 Nov, 2007
Self-Monitoring
Posted by teacherjulie @ 4:56 pm
Shelved under behavior modification, Being a (Special Ed) Teacher, Challenge Yourself, Learning Disabilities, special education, Teaching Techniques

Self-monitoring is assessing how you are doing DURING and AFTER doing something. In other words, this is self-regulating. Why do we need to do this? Why should children with special needs need to learn to do this?

Children with developmental disabilities are often bound to make careless actions. Not that they like to do that. Some of these are:

  • Turning in a test paper without looking or re-checking at the answers written on the paper.
  • Instructions are read hastily and sometimes misunderstood so more often than not, the answers are wrong.
  • When there are manifestations of work output with little or no awareness thereof are observed, then self-monitoring should be practiced.

How?

  • Be reminding to check work or output.
  • By setting standards that should be adhered to, to make work output good.
  • By laying down ground rules on how to do what needs to be done, step and step and making a checklist if these steps are being followed.

These are just a few of the steps to make self-regulation a habit. But when properly done, work output would be better. And remember, this is not just only for these children but for everybody.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 4:56 pm and is filed under behavior modification, Being a (Special Ed) Teacher, Challenge Yourself, Learning Disabilities, special education, Teaching Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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1 Jan, 2008 @ 10:14 pm
John Wills Lloyd said:

Thanks for this post. Your mention of self-monitoring reminds me that I ought to draft an entry about teaching children to monitor their own behavior.

In the 1970s and 80s, my colleagues and I conducted a dozen (or so) studies about teaching students to monitor their own attention to task. We routinely found that when shown how to monitor their own behavior systematically, students who had low levels of attending to task would suddenly have much higher levels of attending (as assessed by our independent observers) and often their academic productivity would increase, too.

To be sure, the children needed highly structured training in how to use the systematic self-monitoring procedures, and the procedures themselves were quite structured (auditory prompts to assess their behavior, written records of their self-assessments). However, we found that teachers could systematically remove the more overt components of the procedure, and the children continued to display high levels of attention to task.

  • Thank you, JWL for the additional input.

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