Responsive teaching: what to do when some students understand, and some don’t

Video transcript

hello i’m craig barton and welcome to this tips for teachers video now this video is actually a direct response to a previous tips for teachers video i was lucky enough to interview the maths legend herself joe morgan and one of the tips joe shared was don’t forget the respond part of responsive teaching and joe’s point was that there are two things we need to consider when we’re doing a model of responsive teaching or assessment for learning one is asking the question and collecting in the information from our students but then the second part which is just as important of course is then responding to that information now during my conversation with joe i outlined a strategy that i use with diagnostic questions to respond to different scenarios from the initial question and i thought i’d just do a video on it just to flesh that out a little bit so let’s imagine that this is the diagnostic question that i’ve asked my students now you might want to just pause the video at this point and just familiarize yourself with this question okay now i may have asked this question as part of a prerequisite knowledge check or it may be a hinge point midway through the lesson when i’m deciding where i’m going to go next or it may be an exit ticket at the end of the lesson when i’m thinking what do i need to do next lesson either way let’s consider three scenarios that could happen after i’ve asked this question so the first is the overwhelming majority of students may get this question correct voting with abcd cards or mini whiteboards or however i choose to collect the information in now in this scenario the way i respond is to quickly do a check that of their reasons so i may ask matthew and i see you’ve chosen b can you just explain why the answers be and i’ll just clarify if i need to matthew’s explanation but then i’m going to move on and the few students who’ve got this question wrong they’ve heard the correct explanation and it’s a small enough number that during the rest of the lesson i can just nip around and just have a quick conversation with them to check that they’re happy and they understand my cutoff point for this by the way is 80 80 and above getting it right i can do a quick run through of the explanation and then crack on let’s consider a second scenario and how i might respond now on the face of this this looks like an absolute disaster there is blanket lack of understanding but actually in terms of a model of responsive teaching this is quite obvious and easy how to respond because we need to revisit this concept if this is prerequisite knowledge i’m going to put my lesson on pause and i’m going to deal with this if this is a hinge point question we’re certainly not moving on we’re going to slow things down maybe back track if this is an exit ticket then this tells me that i need to revisit this at the start the next lesson and crucially because i’ve used a diagnostic question i’ve got some extra insight i can see here that my students are split between dna so i can look at those options those answers and understand the misconception or misunderstanding behind them but i think the most common scenario and this is the most troublesome one is something like this where we have a split we’ve got some students who’ve got this question correct and are ready to move on but we’ve also got a group of students who are struggling on this and are not ready to move on so what do we do in this scenario well my focus as a teacher is going to be on the students who are struggling i’m going to say to them right if you got this question wrong and you’re struggling what i want you to do is i want you to watch me on the board and i’m either going to come up with another example or talk them through something i’m going to support them but what am i going to do with the students who’ve got this question correct i don’t want them sat around doing nothing but at the same time i don’t have to think of another activity to give them and hand out another worksheet or something like that so what i’m going to do instead is i’m going to ask them two of my favorite questions based around this diagnostic question so i’m going to say okay if you’re happy with this you’ve got it right and you’re happy with it i want you to do one of these challenges so i’ll either ask them to do this how would you convince someone who thinks the correct answer is a that their answer is not correct now do the same for c and d so this is a real ramp up of challenge from just getting this question right because now you’ve got to try and understand how somebody might get this wrong but then try and convince them so this is where students have to think perhaps of explanations or visual representations arguments to communicate to somebody who’s struggling with this question why they’re wrong and how to think about it in a different way that’s a real challenge or i’ll set my other favorite challenge which is this change one thing in the question so that a is now the correct answer then do the same for c and d so okay b is the correct answer to this question but how could you tweak this question so a’s right how could you tweak this question so c is right and so on now what i like about these two prompts is they’re generic i can use them with any diagnostic question i can only speak from my experience as mathematics but i can’t see any reason why those same questions couldn’t be used for diagnostic questions in other subjects as well and in terms of how i assess understanding of this what i tend to do is get the students who are working on this just to swap with somebody else is working on it so if they’re answering these on mini whiteboard swap mini whiteboards and have a conversation and so on so there’s some strategies that i use with diagnostic questions to make sure i get the respond part of responsive teaching rights was that any use to you at all how might you use that tip what would you need to change to make it work for you if you did find that useful i’d be super grateful if you could like the video and subscribe to the tips for teachers youtube channel and don’t forget to visit tipsforteachers.com uk for loads more tips like this thanks so much for watching