During a lesson, teachers monitor progress of student learning through formative assessments and address student misunderstandings. Teachers use that information to guide their moves to facilitate student learning and understanding during the current lesson and future lessons. Artifacts should indicate student learning towards the lesson objective or goal.
How do you know what students understand and are able to do DURING THE LESSON?
How do you respond when students don't understand the directions or specific content/concepts?
Monitoring student work means that the teacher actively checks for student understanding of targeted content and mastery of targeted skills. This requires teachers to have a planned content and skills objective that they then check to see if students understand / can do.
For resources on formative assessment go to assessment page
Research shows that monitoring student work, particularly circulating the room and checking the quality of student work, is one of the most effective instructional strategies for increasing student learning.
Whole-class questioning does not accurately capture individual student learning since once one student answers a question, other students can repeat that answer without engaging in the desired thinking.
When you circulate, have a clear sense of what you're looking for regarding student quality (exemplars based on rubrics help with this).
Even if you can check students' work via google docs, walking around and talking to them helps send the message to them that you care about them!
Re-directing off-task student behavior in a non-accusatory way also shows students that you care that they are engaged and learning.