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

Technique 8: Standardize the format
Check for understanding

Though asking questions of students is a great tool to check for understanding, gathering data through observation is arguably even more effective when you can use it. One major benefit of relying on observation to assess student understanding is that it allows you to respond quickly to more complex ideas in more formats than you can assess through questioning alone. Another benefit is that you can “parallel-process”—you can be checking for understanding while students are working. For example, you can quickly observe the quality of your students' thesis paragraphs as they are writing them.

But the greatest advantage of gathering data through observation is its efficiency. Done well it allows you to gather data quickly and about everyone. This is important because gathering data in the midst of instruction is almost always subject to significant time constraints. Say you assign independent work to students for five minutes. By the time you've given students a chance to get started, have answered their questions, and checked to make sure everyone has gotten underway, you might have three minutes to assess thirty students—six seconds per student on average. Many teachers might successfully assess ten students in that amount of time but if you can gather information twice as fast with half as many distractions, you suddenly become able to assess and respond to students in situations where you weren't previously able to. Suddenly six minutes is enough. In some cases two or three minutes can be profoundly useful. If you maximize the efficiency of data gathering, you also increase the times and places when you can use it without redesigning your lessons. You become able to assess what happens during parts of your lesson that might otherwise go unmonitored.

So while efficiency might seem at first like one of the least compelling words in teaching, it turns out to be critical to many of the most important things that differentiate great lessons from others.

Standardize the Format focuses on streamlining data-gathering and making your observation more efficient and accurate. It means designing materials and space so that you're looking predictably—in the same, consistent place every time—for the data you need. You might ask for work to be shown in the margin of a specific page of your students' books, for example, or for students to circle their final answer to a problem set. Or, at the beginning of class, you might give students a “packet” (see technique 4, Double Plan) in which to do key aspects of their work that day, and include clearly visible, preset places to write or take notes.

The following details from lesson packets in the Reading Reconsidered Curriculum my team and I developed offer some examples of ways carefully designed materials can organize the space where students work to make observation and assessment easier.

Some notes about the examples:

· In example 1, the use of a chart helps students keep track of their progress and make sure to answer all parts of a complicated question (three questions about two different excerpts). It also lets the teacher do this as well and to see at a glance how far along students are and to quickly differentiate which part of the task students are struggling with (presumably because they are leaving it blank, writing less, or doing it last).

· In example 2, dividing the task into parts a, b, and c again allows the teacher to Check for Understanding on individual components and quickly assess where students are in the process from a pacing point of view, but here the use of lines reinforces the use of complete sentences versus informal notes in responding.

· In example 3, the scaffolded structure separates the different elements students should be reflecting on without being too structured or leading (or asking for more writing than is needed). It also models for students how to take organized notes.

In addition to enabling you to find answers (or key steps in the work process) more quickly, Standardize the Format allows you to disrupt students less. You won't spend time flipping through their work or asking them to help you find answers and this will allow them to concentrate. Most important, though, instead of expending energy (and using your own working memory) locating answers, you can identify and assess trends among your students' work and spot examples to share with the class. Simplifying search tasks reduces extraneous cognitive load; the more consistent the appearance and placement of the data, the more you will be able to focus on what it's telling you. You perceive more accurately, remember more of what you see, and think more productively about it.

There are some surprising relational benefits to all this “efficiency” and “productivity” and you can see an example of them in the video Nicole Warren: Keystone. As she circulates and observes during the last few minutes of the clip you may notice the beautiful connections she makes with students. There are sincere encouragements and acknowledgments. These little moments of relationship building are surely something most of us seek, so it's important to observe that they stem in part from the ease with which she can find what she is looking for in each student's work. The easiness leaves her relaxed and confident. With her working memory only lightly taxed by search costs, her mind is free to think about each student in turn as she works the room, and all her warmth and graciousness can show.

There are other ways you can continue to prioritize your focus on the content of student work by Standardizing the Format even further. In addition to directing students to answer in the same space, you can also ask them to lift up the key pieces of the answer that you are looking for as you circulate. “Box the equation you used to calculate the sum,” or “Underline the appositive you added to your thesis.” These additional directions not only make it easier for you to focus on the most important aspect of student work when time is of the essence, but also heighten student awareness of the most important variable to include in their work. Boxing the remainder or circling the active verbs in their topic sentence helps students to focus and prioritize.

My team and I recently tried to use Standardize the Format ourselves at a workshop on CFU. The topic was “Reject Self-Report” and the activity was a series of case studies: six transcripts from classroom situations where a teacher had initially relied on student self-report to assess mastery. Teachers in the workshop were asked to rewrite cases, scripting their questions to better gather data about student mastery in lieu of self-report. Workshop participants were asked to complete several of the scenarios over the course of a few minutes. At the bottom was an additional section where people were asked to identify and rewrite a case from their own experience. The page we provided looked like Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1 Reject Self-Report Mini Case Studies

As my team and I circulated, we were able to ascertain the following quickly and easily:

· How quickly people were working and how many scenarios they had completed. This allowed us to make a simple but fundamental decision: How much time should we allocate for the activity? Did people need more time?

· Which scenarios people chose to work on. It was clear at a glance which of the scenarios they'd chosen to rewrite. Each was in its own box of about a quarter page. I could glance over twenty shoulders and know which topics people had found interesting and would want to discuss during the post-activity discussion. It also helped us write scenarios for future workshops. If very few people chose example 5, for example, we could replace it.

· What good ideas and common misunderstandings we could talk about during the debrief. It was easy for me to look for more evidence of something specific; for example, if I saw something intriguing in one participant's answer to example 3 and wanted to know if it was typical, it was ten times easier for me to track other people's responses to that example.

It was also easy to scan to the final question and differentiate those answers. That is, I wanted to look differently at the scenario of their own experience to get a quick sense of the sorts of settings they were finding applicable. This was easy to do because the answer I wanted to analyze more closely was located in the same place on every participant's paper. I could find it and tell it apart in an instant.

People worked for three or four minutes, and the room had about 120 people in it. But at the end of that time, I had a pretty good sense of what the strengths and gaps in understanding were, and it was mostly thanks to an apparently mundane design decision. Merely using Standardize the Format in a very simple way greatly leveraged my ability to understand what was happening in the room.