Checking for understanding – Tips for Teachers Top 5s

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The five tips are:

Use a diagnostic question
Give an interesting example
Give an interesting non-example
What do you understand?
What is the hardest question you know how to answer?

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Video and Podcast transcript

Hello, I’m Craig Barton, and welcome to this Tips for teachers top five all about checking for understanding. Now just before we dive in a reminder that you can access this as an audio podcast, and also as a video, so you can choose your preferred medium and share with colleagues accordingly. And you’ll find links to those either below the podcast in the show notes or below the video in the description, or on tips for teachers.co.uk.

Right checking for understanding now I think you can make the case that checking for understanding is one of if not the most important things that we need to build into our teaching armoury. Because without good checks for understanding, we’ve no idea if our students are learning things, understanding things, developing misconceptions, and so on.

Now, there’s loads of different ways that we can check for understanding. And I’m going to use a kind of concrete example for this as a as a math teacher, I’m going to choose a math specific topic. But hopefully, these ideas will transfer across different maths topics and also across different subjects. So the maths topic I’ve chosen is the wonderful world of equivalent fractions. And I want you to imagine that I just taught a class, the method of how to check fractions are equivalent, how to generate more equivalent fractions and so on. And I want to check their understanding. Now one option is I do it like this, I give them a worksheet or ask them questions of this form. Now notice these are very procedural, very mechanical, very algorithmic, it’s, it’s checking student’s understanding, but only at a very surface level. Now that’s important, these types of questions are important. But if this is all we give our students as part of that check for understanding, I don’t think we have any way of knowing just how deep and secure their understanding is.

So over the last few years, as I’ve been lucky enough to watch hundreds of lessons, I’ve been making notes, or have the different types of checks for understanding that skill teachers do. And in my book tips for teachers available in all good and evil bookstores, I’ve shared 10 different types of questions that teachers use when checking for understanding. And in this video, I’m going to share five of my favourite of those, all of which are based around equivalent fractions, but hopefully the idea is transfer.

So the first one is to use diagnostic questions to check for understanding. Now I love a diagnostic question. I’ve got the website diagnostic questions.com 10s of 1000s of free diagnostic questions for all subjects. I think diagnostic questions are great for checking for understanding for two reasons. Firstly, if a child gets a diagnostic question wrong, you learn something about the specific nature of their misunderstanding, because diagnostic questions when they’re designed well, the wrong answers, there’s a reason behind them a common misconception, a common misunderstanding. So if you have a sense of why your students got something wrong, instead of just that they’ve got it wrong, then you can direct your support accordingly. That’s one reason. The second reason I love diagnostic questions is that once you’ve established what the correct answer is, you can turn your attention or your students attention to the wrong answers. So you can say things like, Okay, we know c is wrong. Why am I not a student? Think the correct answer is C, we’ll get the students to write down that can they understand where somebody might go wrong? And I love this one as well. You can say OK, sees the wrong answer. Can you change the question as little as possible to make see the correct answer? So you get more for your money when using diagnostic questions as a check for understanding.

Okay, Tip two, I really like this one, give an interesting example. I’m a bit obsessed. In fact, forget bits are massively obsessed with learner generated examples. And in the tips of teachers book, I do a massive tip all about learning generated examples. But we’ll just do briefly here why I think they’re really good to use as a check for understanding. So we can give our students examples all day long on worksheets once we think up and so on. And that’s important. But a real good way to see what our students understand is to challenge them to generate an example themselves. And I find that asking them to generate an interesting example, gives us a sense of where the boundary of their understanding is. So if I just say, give me an example of an equivalent fraction, that’s fine, but students could come up with something simple, a half and two quarters, give me an interesting example. Well, then they have to think a bit outside the box, and they start pushing towards the boundary of their understanding. And that’s where we want to see what where’s the edge? Where is it for them. And of course, they may tip over, they may tip over into something that isn’t an equivalent fraction. But that’s really important to know. And what we can do with these interesting examples. Students can write them down many white board books, whatever, we can then collect a load of them together, bang them up on the board, and then discuss them as a whole class. Are these two fractions equivalent? How do we know they’re equivalent and so on?

Related to that that kind of sibling of the interesting example is the interesting non example lover non example didn’t do enough of this. Many years as a teacher, non examples are so powerful. But again, interesting non examples I’m interested in, I don’t just want like one half and 2122 2150 2155, or something like that. I want interesting non examples. So a good way to phrase this with students is to say, can you come up with a pair of fractions that somebody might think is equivalent? But in fact, they’re not. So this is a challenge to students? Can they get to the other side of that boundary of that we talked about before? How far can they push their knowledge the and get to the other side? So this is great to do, again, get the students to write down an interesting pair of fractions that are not equivalent, bang, a few up on the board. And again, we can have a discussion, Are these not equivalent? How would we convince somebody that they’re not equivalent, and so on? So asking students for non examples of the things that you’ve just taught them, I think worked really well.

Tip four is nice. So a classic thing I did for many, many years is I’d say to students, do you understand? Are we happy with that? So do you understand equivalent fractions, everybody happy with equivalent fractions? And the problem you’ve got there is, firstly, it’s really easy for students to opt out of that. But secondly, you’re not assessing their understanding, you’re assessing their perception of understanding. Yeah, we think we understand this. No, no, no, no, what we need instead is a natural check for understanding. So flip it on its head a bit. Instead of Do you understand what do you understand write down on a mini whiteboard, write me down three things you understand about equivalent fractions. Really, really powerful check for understanding that and then again, we can collect together some different responses and talk through them.

And fifth and final one. I know I say this all the time, but I really like this one as well. You know, what’s the hardest question you know how to answer? So say two students taught you equivalent fractions? On your mini whiteboard? On one side of the mini whiteboard right? me the hardest equivalent fractions question you know how to answer yourself. And on the other side of the mini whiteboard, write down how you answer it, write me down, the working out, or any annotations in and so on. And of course, what we can do students can swap with their partner or I can collect a few upon the board and we can try them out as a class and so on. I really like that one.

So to recap, there’s five tips to improve your check your understanding to move those checks away from the kind of surface level procedural so the more interesting, the more challenging, the more reliable check for the depth of students understanding. So tip number one use diagnostic questions. Tip number two, challenge students to come up with their own interesting example. Tip three challenge students to come up with their own interesting non example. Tip Four, ask students what they understand. And Tip Five, what is the hardest question you know how to answer.

There’s a load more extra tips on checking for understanding in tips of teachers plus over 400 tips on loads of different aspects of teaching as well. And in addition, if you go to tips for teachers dot code at UK, you’ll find the tips for teachers podcast where some of the world’s leading educational and inspirational teachers share practical tips you can use the very next time you step into a classroom. I also capture the videos of those conversations and chop them up into individual tips so you can share them with colleagues. And there’s the tips for teachers newsletter, a lovely new tip arrives in your inbox every Monday morning to trading classes that coming week. And finally, I’ve got available, some on demand and face to face tips for teachers CPD sessions, if you want to learn some more, thanks so much for watching.