Leaders of Their Own Learning
Chapter 2: Checking for Understanding during Daily Lessons
- Checking for understanding
A daily practice for teachers and students. For teachers, this is the way we see if students are following along, understanding content and processes, and to adapt our teaching to misunderstandings or misconceptions. For students, this practice prepares them to stop and self assess their own thinking/learning. What better way to make students take ownership of their learning than by making them more accountable!
Checking for Understanding Categories:
Teachers should use a variety of methods to check for understanding throughout each lesson.
Writing and Reflection
Student discussion protocols
Quick checks
Strategic observation and listening
Debriefs
Why Does this Practice Matter?
Provides immediate information about progress toward standard or learning target mastery
Supports students towards meeting rigorous goals
Builds capacity for reflection
Prepares students for college and career
Getting Started
Laying the Groundwork
Build a classroom culture of trust and collaboration.
Treat students as partner in the learning process. Engage them in understanding and shaping learning targets, classroom rules and norms, project ideas, and every other aspect of learning.
Show students the rationale for curriculum and instruction and be transparent about the standards and important decisions.
Get to know students as individuals and continually assess and adjust practice according to their readiness.
Create school and class wide norms that encourage everyone to persevere with challenging tasks and justify their thinking with evidence.
Model collaboration. Students need to see the adults in the school community working together, giving feedback, and being open about their questions and mistakes.
Structure lessons to support frequent checks for understanding
Pre-plan strategic questions to monitor student learning
Sample Checks for Understanding
- Writing and Reflection Techniques (writing to learn, not learning to write)
Interactive writing (teachers and students work together to create a short writing)
Read-write-pair-share
Summary writing
Note catchers (graphic organizers)
Journals
Admission and exit tickets
- Student Discussion Protocols
Back-to-back and face-to-face protocol (stand back-to-back and listen to questions/prompts then teacher signals to turn face-to-face to discuss)
Carousel brainstorm (questions are posted around the room and small groups of students rotate through each station and answer each question as a group)
Write-pair-share
Think-pair-share
- Quick Checks
Factual or brief-response checks
Go-around (use for 1 or 2 word answers and go around the room quickly)
Write on individual dry-erase boards
Do now (brief problem, task, or activity that immediately engages)
Clicker Technology
Monitoring Confusion or Readiness
Explain it back
Table tags (students move to table that best represents their level of understanding)
Thumb-ometer or fist to five (shows degrees of agreement or readiness)
Glass, bugs, mud (Understanding clear/glass, little fuzzy/bugs, none/mud)
Status Checks
Sticky notes on Continuum
Learning lineups (make a line across the room from beginner/novice to expert)
Human bar graph (make lines/bars to show understanding)
Scatter plot graph (like the human bar graph but without the lines)
Probing Deeper Understanding and Reflection
Hot seat (students answer questions under their seats and others respond)
Admission and exit tickets
Presentation assessments
- Strategic Observation and Listening
Cold Call (drawing names randomly)
Warm call (take notes/talk to neighbor before names are randomly called)
No Opt Out (keep working on same question to it is answered correctly, people who didn’t complete must restate correct answers)
Think
- Debriefs
Last chance in lesson to check for understanding
Return to learning target, elicit student reflection, probe for students to provide evidence for their own learning.
In Practice
- Engage in targeted instruction to address gaps in understandings
Plan lesson, implement lesson. Check for understanding, make adjustments, check for understanding, plan next lesson
Teach students to monitor progress and set goals Keep the right balance between consistency and variety of strategies
Summary
This chapter really showed me different ways to check for understanding throughout my lessons. I think this will be the easiest component to implement into my teaching!
Check out other chapters by clicking on the links below:
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