As teachers, our main goal is to help our students learn something new every day. But how do we know if the words we are saying are actually being understood by our students? I remember my first year of teaching, I planned out these, in my opinion, beautiful lectures filled with information I found to be fascinating. I left most of these lessons feeling like I had inculcated my students’ minds with great stories that they would remember forever. And then we got to the test. My students bombed it. I was devastated. How could my beautiful lessons have been so lost on my students? After chatting with some fellow teachers, I learned that despite all my planning and effort, I had not once checked in with my students to see if they were really understanding what I was telling them. I had just barreled along mistaking my comprehension for theirs. Since then, I have learned several techniques to tell if my students are actually learning.
Question Based Note Taking
A great way to see if in the moment students are grasping what you are telling them is to have them tell you what note to take. Rather than putting up on the board yourself the details you want students to know, use socratic questioning to draw the information back out of the students. If they are unable to summarize what you just told them, you know that you need to re-explain what you just taught until they are able to understand. This slight reformatting of a practice you already do will help you catch problems before they grow.
Whiteboard Checks
Using whiteboards is a great way to take a quick pulse of the room and catch trends in student understanding. I find this method particularly helpful in math and grammar but it can be used in other classes as well. I pose a key question up on the board and have the students solve it independently on their whiteboards. I then have them all hold up their boards at the same time. By taking a quick glance around the room, I can tell if most of my class is lost and I need to reteach or I can isolate any individual students who need a bit of extra support.
Quick Quizzes
Another great way to check in with students is to give them low stakes, short, frequent quizzes. These serve as a way to get a bit more of a sense of how well students are recalling information from across several lessons within your unit. For these, I will pass out a sheet of paper and write 3-4 key questions from past lessons that I want to ensure my students understand. The student’s answers for each are only a sentence long at most, and I typically have students swap and grade each others’ so I can easily flip through the stack and see what areas I need to hit more in my review. These quizzes also let students see how well they are remembering and if they need to spend some more time with certain content.
After incorporating these types of checks into my lessons, my students’ understanding and my own teaching have greatly improved. Rather than answering questions myself, I have learned how to make my students the owners of their own learning.
