Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 6: Replace self-report
Check for understanding

The great basketball coach John Wooden—a former English teacher before he won ten NCAA championships in twelve years at UCLA—defined teaching as knowing the difference between “I taught it” and “they learned it.” Part of what's so profound about this perfect expression of the core challenge of teaching—in any setting—is its calm presumption that errors will emerge. It is not whether, but when. Every teacher seeks to present material clearly and memorably so that their students grasp meaning and importance. You want the initial presentation to be as good as it can be, but mopping up afterwards is inevitable. No matter how well you explain or demonstrate the material, gaps in understanding will emerge. It's what you do next, how you respond to errors, that matters most. Will you see misunderstandings? Will you ignore them? Can you fix them? Will you blame students and express your frustration? There will be a gap between what you taught and what they understood. Regardless of why it will be your job to fix it.

With that in mind I can safely say that one of the most useful teaching videos you're likely to see is Denarius Frazier: Remainder. It's a thing of quiet beauty and I'll discuss it extensively in this chapter. But for now here's a brief overview and some highlights.

The video starts with students hard at work on a pair of problems. Denarius wants to use the independent work to gauge how his students are doing, so he begins to go from student to student to observe their work. Quickly he assesses where each student is and provides useful and supporting feedback. “[You're] killing it,” he tells one young man. “Keep going,” he tells a young woman. “Make sure you have the remainder and the quotient.”

“What's going on here?” he asks the next young woman, and spots the fact that her digits are not lined up. A few seats later he tells one young woman quickly, “Oh, much better, thank you,” affirming both her progress and his own awareness of the progress of her learning.

As he works, Denarius is able to assess not only the progress of individuals but also of the class. The class is dividing polynomials and the most frequent issue is lack of clarity about how to find the remainder. He pauses, presents an example to the class, guides them through an analysis of where it was effective and where it went wrong, and sends them back to their quiet, productive practice.

Every student feels seen and supported. It is evident that their teacher can and will help them succeed. It's a case study in how effective teaching builds relationships. Because Denarius is alert to gaps in understanding as they emerge, he is able to help each student, calmly and steadily, and create an environment of trust and respect. The trust, as I argued in Chapter One, is not a precondition to Denarius teaching them, but in many ways an outcome. At the very least the two develop in synergy. You teach me well and I will come to have faith in you.

This chapter is about the gap between teaching and learning: about how to see it, how to respond to it, and how to make students comfortable with the struggle it implies. It's going to be technical stuff. What should you look at and look for? How can you respond to mistakes? How can you get students to reveal misunderstandings to you willingly? But don't be fooled. The consequences of a teacher mastering such technical details are not arcane. As Denarius shows, they create the conditions under which students thrive.

Technique 6: Replace self-report

One of the most common methods teachers use to find out whether their students understand what they've been teaching is to ask them directly, “Do you understand?” This seems logical enough, but it turns out to be a relatively ineffective (if easily improved upon) way to assess student understanding.

Let's say a science teacher has just finished explaining cellular structure to her sixth graders. “OK,” she says, “those are the basics of cellular structure. Does everyone understand?” Or perhaps she's a bit more specific: “Is everyone clear on the differences between plant and animal cells?”

She'd likely get what seems like confirmation: mutters and nods from a smattering of students. Perhaps a “yeah” or “uh-huh,” though perhaps she won't hear anything. Either way, she's likely to take it as evidence that students are with her—call it apparent assent—and say something like: “Good. Let's push on to the role of chloroplasts.”

But questions that ask students to evaluate their own understanding of something they've just learned tend to yield false confirmation—especially when they are framed as a yes/no question. The primary reason for this is that the questions rely on self-report, which is notoriously inaccurate. People, especially novices, often don't know what they don't know about a topic, and even if they do they are often unlikely to acknowledge it when asked.

If, for example, you ask a group of students, “Are you clear on the causes of the American Revolution?” and everyone says yes, it is because they are clear on the causes they are aware of knowing about at the moment. If they missed some, if their conception contains misinformation, they won't know it without some way of checking themselves against a fuller description of the concepts they should know and which, to you, are implicit in the question. Ironically, someone with deep understanding of the causes of the Revolution is more likely to answer in the negative: “I still don't totally understand why the Intolerable Acts unified dissent rather than isolating colonial radicals …”

Ask me, a novice, “Are you clear on the differences between plant and animal cells?” and really you are asking me, “Are you aware of some differences between plant and animal cells?” or “Are you aware that there are differences between plant and animal cells?” “Yes,” I will tell you, as I think of those things I do know which come readily to mind. They are shaped differently and plant cells have a cell wall that's relatively inflexible, I think. Got it. As I tell you this, though, I remain unaware that the nucleus is positioned differently within the cell, and I have no idea what lysosomes are. My honest answer is yes, but I don't know what I don't know. Sadly then, the less your students know about a topic, the more likely their apparent assent is to be inaccurate.

However, even this example presumes that I am trying very hard to share everything I know about plant and animal cells with you, my teacher. Just as often there are social and psychological barriers that prevent students from revealing their confusion. Let's say that I am aware that I didn't understand the difference between plant and animal cells. Saying “Actually, I don't know” means stopping the room—causing the teacher to go back and re-explain, when the presumption is clearly that she and my classmates do not want to. It means appearing to be, possibly, the only person in the room who didn't get it. Or the only person in the room who doesn’t get that you’re not supposed to say you don’t get it. All this for the uncertainty that the re-explanation will really help. It's easier just to tell myself I'll figure it out on my own. Such factors prevent most people, not just students, from speaking up when they are confused. When was the last time you stopped the room during a meeting to say, “Wait, I don't get it”? If a colleague did this, what are the odds that you felt (or expressed) appreciation rather than exasperation? Students may occasionally say, “No, I don't get it,” but not reliably so. There are too many implicit social pressures pushing them to keep their confusion to themselves.

A final factor that makes “Everybody get it?” questions ineffective is the format of the questions. They offer two bad choices. In most cases students' understanding is somewhere in the middle; whether they get “it” is actually a series of questions in which the answer is yes to some and no to others. The answer to a yes/no “Do you get it?” question requires the conflation of a lot of data points; it causes students to choose one oversimplification or the other.

The good news is that when we ask questions like “Everybody get it?” we are recognizing that we are at a point when it would be beneficial to check for understanding. If we notice when we ask these sorts of questions, we can replace them with some more productive alternatives, what I call “targeted questions,” specific, objective questions focused on the content in question and asked in an open-ended format.

Imagine for a moment that our sixth-grade science teacher notices herself saying “Everybody get it?” during her introduction to plant and animal cell differences and tries to replace that question with something better. She might then say:

· “OK, let's just check a few of the key ideas. If I was looking at a photograph of some cells and they were rounded and spaced randomly, would I be looking at plant or animal cells? Jasmine?”

· “Good, and if I were looking at plant cells, what would cause them to have a more rectangular pattern? Louis?”

· “Great. So which types of cells have a membrane, Kelsey, plant cells, animal cells, or both?”

· “Good. Finally, Shawn, what are lysosomes and which kinds of cells would I find them in?”

First, you'll notice that our science teacher's questions are now objective. They don't ask whether students think they know, they ask them to demonstrate if they do, so the accuracy of the data is now far better.

Second, these are not yes/no questions. This makes it harder to guess the right answer or to get it right with only the most basic understanding.

One common solution to the problem of apparent assent is worth being wary of. Many teachers try to replace the yes/no question with a signal from students: Thumbs up if you understand the differences between plant and animal cell structure, thumbs down if you don't, thumbs sideways if you're not sure. This may seem like an improvement—you're likely to get more responses from students—but the problems of self-report remain—you're still relying on students' perception of whether they know something and the fact is, even if they're totally honest, many are probably still wrong on that account. Putting your thumb up or down may make the self-report more engaging and thus remove some of the awkward silence but in terms of giving you better data on your students' understanding, it's mostly an illusion. Targeted questions are far better.

Targeted questions work best when you plan them in advance, by the way. It's hard to think of the four questions that will quickly reveal where your students stand on the spur of the moment. And if you're trying to think of the next question you won't be able to listen to the answers very well. Or to think about your tone of voice. That's important because if you asked targeted questions in an environment where, say, you smiled warmly to show that getting it wrong would not make you frustrated, then you would make the opportunity to check for understanding more productive. Smiling when you ask your targeted question or perhaps when students struggle to answer reminds your class that you want honesty and that knowing about misconceptions early makes them easier to fix. This is a topic I will discuss further in technique 12, Culture of Error.

There's one other thing that will help you ensure that your students succeed: Cold Calling (see technique 34). This technique allows you to gather data from a sample of students from around the room. If you rely instead only on students who volunteer to answer, you will gather erroneous data. Students who volunteer to answer mostly do so when they think they know. Students who don't think they know are less likely to raise their hands. Unless you find a way to call on those pupils, you will always overestimate the proportion of your class that understands a concept.

Cold Calling also helps in another way. It helps you to move quickly through your questions. That might seem counterintuitive; wouldn't a teacher want to assess as thoroughly as possible? But one reason why teachers so routinely recognize the need to check for understanding but fail to act on it—or act on it in a cursory way—is time pressure. There's never enough time, as you know if you're a teacher, and taking five minutes to circle back to double-check that everyone understands is stressful when you have ground to cover. If it takes forever and disrupts your pacing, or causes you to drop the last activity of your lesson plan, of course you won't do it. But if you could double-check in thirty seconds then you might really do it, so one of the keys to replacing self-report with targeted questions is to do it quickly—ideally in less than a minute. If (and only if) you can do it fast will you be likely to do it often. So even if it yields imperfect data, seek to gather what you can through the best questions you can design in a minute or less. You can use the remaining time to review if necessary.

Asking targeted questions can be just as valuable for assessing understanding of tasks students are about to do as it is for assessing understanding of content you've just taught. If you're sending students off for eight minutes of independent or partner work, it's really good to ask them a few targeted questions about the task so that you don't find out halfway through that they weren't really clear on how to write up their discussion notes or even that they had to write them. Generally speaking, the longer the task you are sending students off to do, the more important it is to assess their clarity on the task beforehand via targeted questions.

Recently I observed a lesson where a teacher wanted her students to read a text, note phrases and phrasings that were intentionally repetitive, and track shifts in who the implicit audience was. They were supposed to work solo for five minutes and then discuss with a partner.

Before she sent students off to do this task, she asked them targeted questions to review. It took her about twenty seconds and she used Cold Call to ensure that she wasn't just calling on the kids who thought they knew:

It would be so easy to have some portion of the class set off earnestly but do the wrong task! Ten minutes spent on a task for thirty students is five hours of learning time allocated with a single set of directions! Replacing “Everyone understand what we're doing?” with targeted questions is a smart investment.

It's crucial to remember that the goal of targeted questions isn't to be comprehensive but to create a small data sample where previously no data existed. It's often better to be quick and bring data to multiple places in your lesson than to be comprehensive and exhaustive, but assess infrequently.

You might be wondering if this means you're doing something wrong if you still occasionally ask students, “Got it?” or “Everybody clear on that?” Don't worry. There's no reason to be absolutist; you will almost assuredly say those phrases sometimes (I know I do); it's almost impossible to root out familiar rhetorical habits and if you did, the self-consciousness it requires might be a distraction. It's just important to recognize how often we use self-report and how much of an illusion it creates. When you use such phrases you are telling yourself: I have reached a natural transition point where I should check in with students and find out how they are doing. Hopefully in the aggregate that consciousness can be curative.

The video Gabby Woolf: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde shows an interesting adaptation of Replace Self-Report. If you're not familiar with it, Robert Louis Stevenson's novella is a challenging read. For example, the passage Gabby was reading with her Year 10 class at London's King Solomon Academy begins: “Nearly a year later, in the month of October, 18—, London was startled by a crime of singular ferocity and rendered all the more notable by the high position of the victim. The details were few and startling.”

Gabby and her students read the passage aloud—you can hear them doing a lovely job reading it via FASE Reading in the clip Gabby Woolf: Keystone—and because of its complexity, Gabby paused after reading and told the class she wanted to “check that you understand.” She then projected a series of short targeted questions on the board and gave students a minute or so to review the answers in pairs. The questions were straightforward and designed to yield short answers that revealed student understanding (or the lack of it) quickly:

· “What month did the murder take place in?”

· “Why was London particularly startled by the victim?”

· “Who saw the murder?”

· “Where did she see the murder from?

· “Who is the murderer?”

Gabby wanted to ensure that despite archaic syntax such as “singular ferocity” and “rendered all the more notable” they had grasped the critical details of what had taken place.

You can see her reviewing these answers with her students in the video. Notice her warm tone and brisk pace. Her constant encouragement—“OK, good”—and the way her Cold Call keeps the pace moving allows her to sample a cross-section of students. She also slows the pace of her speech a bit to imply a slightly more reflective tone when she transitions: “Good, so we get the picture of what's happened. Now go back to this question: How does Stevenson sensationalize the murder?”

Had Gabby asked this question without first checking for understanding, students might have engaged in the analysis confused about basic facts. But her questions, planned in advance for precision and speed, allow her to ensure that they are ready for a deeper discussion. The pair review prior to her questions also has the effect of allowing students to encode the answers more strongly in memory. And her tone is warm and her pace brisk, so she accomplishes the whole thing in about a minute.