[Music] foreign podcast and when I I've asked quite a few pretty switched on people including like um Tom sharington what's the absolute most important thing for teachers to do and the answer is check for understanding okay if you're not checking for understanding you're not working out the difference between between what you think you're teaching and what your students are actually taking from the lesson um for thinking about this in another way um Dylan William has essentially dedicated his whole career to checking for understanding that's basically um what formative assessment is but they're not just checking
for understanding actually acting on the data that you collect from that checking for understanding um so I mean what does that mean practically it just means things like cold call it means mini whiteboards it means stuff like Desmos teaching students to check understanding for themselves it means stuff like I had Paul spenceley a science teacher on the podcast um helping students to analyze the types of areas they're making things like that you know there's teacher checking for understanding peer and self understanding great great quote from Dylan William in a recent podcast is good feedback works
works towards its own redundant see so checking for understanding in a way and supporting students to check for understanding in a way such that you don't need to keep on doing it for them but they start to do it for themselves um coming back to that learning to learn kind of thing we were talking about is um really valuable so that's kind of the level one of this takeaway the level two helps us understand why it's really so important um check for understanding is the basis of working out what works in education um you know
if we think about what is a research study a research study is essentially a systematic approach to checking for understanding you do something to one group you do something different to another group then you check for understanding to see what works so if we do nothing else if we never teach teachers in teacher education how to do anything we only taught them to check for understanding they would derive pretty much every instructional principle that we have in every technique because they would know what's working along the way and they would know what's not working and
step back even further check for understanding in many ways is is essentially the sign the scientific method so at the classroom level we need to check for understanding what's going on in our lesson but it that process that cycle of trying stuff out and checking if it's actually working is the basis of of all learning uh both inside and outside of Virginia biggie this one right okay so a few things from me here so first just a reflection I think you're right one of the things you said earlier on really resonates with me this that
the response to that check for understanding if you're not doing that you might as well not bother with a check for understanding and when Joe Morgan was on the tips of teachers podcast um a while ago she said that whenever you go to CPD about responsive teaching and checking for understanding the emphasis is always on the check for understanding it's not so much on the responding because the responding is dead hard right like if you've got half your kids know it and half your kids don't that's when you've really got to think what you're going
to do so yeah if you're going to check for understanding preparing in advance how you're going to respond for different scenarios feels feels really really important and two follow-up questions on this all so you mentioned lots of different kind of mechanisms for checking for understanding cold call Mini whiteboards and so on and so forth and this this often comes up a lot on the podcast particularly many whiteboards if there's a drinking game on the tips for teachers podcast it'd be have a shot every time somebody mentions mini whiteboard after the Adam boxer episode everyone would
be ever want to be hammered but the thing I think about a lot here is why why if you had mini whiteboards available so you could elicit responses from all your kids would you ever cold call where's the argument for cold calling if you can get all the responses that's a really great question I haven't thought about that before and it's relevant to me because I do both use mini whiteboards and I cold call things I think I'd say um it depends upon timing um like how much time you have it also depends upon the
type of answer so mini whiteboards are great in in a like time press scenario when you're doing like multiple choice questions when you're doing single answer questions single word questions things like that the pace of the lesson kind of slow and things can get bogged down a little bit as soon as you start doing like extended written answers now many whiteboards are excellent for that because um you can overcome the transient information effect and you can take a student's written out so you can put it under a doc a visualizer projected up on the board
and edit it and and go through it and that's awesome as well um but also I think there's a there's a benefit to getting students to verbalize their thinking um to vocalize it and and it kind of enables a bit more of a dynamic kind of problem solving and discussion and refinement in the moment as well um so yeah and and also you know if if you're trying to just quickly go through like often I'll often use cold calling when I'm actually doing like a second worked example so I'll do the first worked example explain
every step then I'll have my pop six in one hand and my marker in the other and I'll do the first line of working and say what am I going to do next Craig and Craig will hopefully tell me that's exactly right blah blah blah what am I going to do next based upon the first work example Harry and Harry will tell me um so I think it's really good for that Snappy stuff whereas if I said what's the next step everyone meaning whiteboards would be like 30 seconds later um you know what are they
going to write divide both sides by three or a symbol or like you know so I think there's that kind of in the moment just keeping everyone engaged kind of um pop stick thing that I really like using but then it's like okay we're on all now going to do a you do and I'm going to check if like 80 or more of the class knows before I set you an independent work and then I'll know who to follow up with or I'll know if like lots of people don't understand and then I can go
through another couple of examples I've answered just a couple of two bonus Reflections before I ask you the this last thing first is I'm a big fan though I call this the Holy Trinity of um checking for understanding I love this now so it's the combo of you ask a question um I like the kids to do if it's like a more extended thing the working out on the back of the mini whiteboards and then the final answer on the front of the whiteboards and then I was like okay three two one hold them up
so I get a bit of a sense what's going on and then without me evaluating it in any way then they discuss with their Partners compare what's the same what's different and then I warm all based on what I've seen on the Whiteboard so you're getting almost it slows things down but you're getting the best of all the worlds you've got the whole class response you've got the paired discussion then you go because I agree with you the big Advantage for me of cold call is you get that verbal interaction they can refine the responses
as well well so I love that I'm going to patent that I think Holy Trinity is a phrase has been taken um already but if I can get the Holy Trinity of checking for understanding math I think we're laughing there um second thing I was going to say this is a big big shout out to you Ali for one of your interviews and also your excellent book um was it who's it Anita Archer who was talking about um the importance of we do and I always cut out the we do you know when I'm doing
a doing a work exam I always go from Works example to a your turn straight away and it was only when I listened to that conversation and in particular I found powerful when I read your book and you all um almost kind of scripted out an example of a we do where you can really play around with the different means of participation a bit of call and response a bit of maybe mini whiteboards a bit of cold core I feel that was is really powerful so as a key check for understanding within the works example
process I think the we do is really important but the final question I was going to say to you is and it relates back to something we discussed earlier on Ali do you think it's important to vary the types of questions we ask when we check for understanding because again I'm guilty of this I use a lot of diagnostic questions and they're quite they're very good at identifying single steps in multi-step procedures you can do a bit of the conceptual stuff as well but it's more kind of procedural or if I do like mini whiteboard
stuff as you've alluded to it tends to be more of a kind of procedural question and I just fear same with the retrieval that unless we're kind of testing the depth of understanding by varying these questions around a bit maybe we're only getting a sense of that kind of surface level so where do you stand on kind of different types of questions you ask to check for understanding yeah it's a good question and again not something I've thought about heaps but I think maybe that's just because it's kind of different concepts and different understandings lend
themselves to checking them in different ways and this is this kind of back to that extraneous versus intrinsic cognitive kind of an idea um it's a question of asking like what's what's intrinsic what's the heart of the the the the knowledge that we're trying to check for understanding because you're going to get that and then that's then going to determine how you're going to check check for that understanding so some things if they're if it's more event related interrelated kind of a concept that has multiple moving Parts you probably need some kind of verbal kind
of dialogic thing or some written response whereas if it's if it's literally what's the first step and why um that can be a diagnostic question but I think also um good question is in any scenario will always always probe so you know the a misconception is revealed and then the the probing will start into with exactly the root of that and that helps to direct how the kind of responsive teaching follows because if you're just like oh yep you pick B that means you have well it to be fair in diagnostic questions it probably does
actually just mean that they have that misconception but even then asking a student to articulate it um can help you to kind of hit it off even even more directly so yeah I think I think to summarize the content determines how to check for understanding right so what foreign [Music]
