A self-adjoint formulation of the energy transport model of semiconductor devices is proposed. This new formulation leads to symmetric and monotonic properties of the resulting system of nonlinear algebraic equations from an adaptive finite element approximation of the model. A node-by-node iterative method is then presented for solving the system. This is a globally convergent method that does not require the assembly of the global matrix system and full Jacobian matrices. An adaptive algorithm implementing this method is described in detail to illustrate the main features of this paper, namely, adaptation, node-by-node calculation, and global convergence. Numerical results of simulations on deep-submicron diode and MOSFET device structures are given to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the algorithm.