Teaching with Confidence: How 8 Quick Checks for Understanding Can Help

Teaching with Confidence: How 8 Quick Checks for Understanding Can Help

As an educator, it’s essential to ensure that your students are learning and understanding what you’re teaching them. A teacher who can confidently affirm that their students understand the concepts they’re teaching is crucial to student success. However, it’s not always easy to gauge how much your students understand, particularly in large classes with multiple students who have different learning styles and backgrounds.

That’s where quick checks for understanding come into play. Quick checks are a set of techniques that teachers can use to evaluate the progress of their students. These techniques help to identify any gaps in understanding, allowing for a targeted and efficient approach to teaching.

Here are eight tried and tested quick checks for understanding that can help you teach confidently:

1. Exit Tickets: At the end of a lesson, hand out a pre-prepared ticket with a question related to the content just taught. Students must answer and hand the ticket back before leaving the classroom. This technique provides teachers with immediate feedback on student comprehension.

2. Multiple Choice Questions: This is a useful technique to use at the beginning or end of a lesson. It provides a quick assessment of students’ grasp of the material.

3. Whiteboards: Have students record short answers on whiteboards, which you can scan to assess their level of comprehension.

4. Think-Pair-Share: This technique promotes teamwork among students. Students think independently, discuss in pairs and then share with the class as a whole.

5. Weekly Quizzes: A weekly quiz provides an overview of the week’s lessons and highlights areas that need to be addressed further.

6. One-Minute Papers: Ask students to summarize the key points of a lesson in one minute, at the end of class.

7. Gallery Walk: Hang post-it notes with key concepts around the room. Students walk around and add to each note, expanding on the central ideas.

8. Student Data Tracking: Encourage students to track their own progress in a particular subject to foster ownership and accountability.

In conclusion, incorporating quick checks for understanding allows teachers to teach with confidence and provides a better learning experience for students. By using these techniques, teachers can get an immediate sense of how much their students understand, allowing for any gaps in understanding to be addressed before moving on to new material.

Incorporate these techniques into your lesson plan, leverage technology, and encourage students to track their own progress, and you’ll be able to confidently assess student comprehension while providing a tailored learning experience that fosters academic success.