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

Technique 10: Show me
Check for understanding

Another useful tool in making effective and efficient observations of student work involves flipping the dynamic in which a teacher works to gather data about a group of students whose role in this process is largely passive. Instead, in Show Me, students actively present the teacher with visual evidence of their understanding. This gives teachers a way to quickly assess an entire class's understanding, more or less at a glance, and has the added benefit of often being enjoyable to students.

Show Me could mean students presenting answers on mini-whiteboards, as you'll see in the video Dani Quinn: Show Me (which we'll study more in a moment) or holding up a number of fingers, each representing the answer to a multiple-choice problem on cue, as Brian Belanger/Denarius Frazier do in the video Belanger/Frazier: Show Me Montage. They've cut out the need to circulate around the room to gather data but still are able to get a strong sense for where everyone in the class stands.

Here are the basic criteria for a good Show Me. It should ask students to (1) present objective data, (2) usually in unison, and (3) in a format that the teacher can assess at a glance. It's worth taking a moment to go a bit deeper into each of these criteria.

Present objective data: When Denarius and Brian ask students to respond by showing on their fingers which answer they chose, they are presenting their actual answer, not their (subjective) opinion about their own understanding. Self-report, as we discussed earlier, is notoriously unreliable. So versions of Show Me that take subjective self-report data and make it visible (e.g. “Tell me if you understand: Thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs sideways”) don't help much. You want to see their actual answer. “Hold up one finger if you chose answer A, two if you chose answer B,” and so forth is a better approach.

In unison: In most cases asking students to share their answers visually works best when it happens in unison, for efficiency reasons and to preserve the integrity of the data. Imagine you're a student. You chose answer B, but for whatever reasons don't share your answer right away when the teacher asks the class to hold up their answer. Glancing around the room, you see eighteen classmates showing they chose answer C. If you reveal that you answered B, you will likely be the only one. Will you change your answer? Studies have repeatedly shown that people are deeply swayed by the answers of their peers. In a classic study by Solomon Asch, for example, experimental subjects were placed in a group of “participants,” who were in fact confederates of the experimenters. The group was asked to compare the lengths of a series of lines that were clearly of different lengths. Without confederates present, subjects reported the length of the lines incorrectly less than 1 percent of the time, but in a setting where confederates consistently reported believing the lines were the same length, most people made efforts to conform, giving an answer they knew to be wrong at least some of the time. A third of participants changed any given answer on average and 75 percent of participants changed an answer at least once over twelve trials. Conclusion: Most people will change their answers to something they don't believe is right in order to conform. If everyone presents their data point simultaneously and on cue, it prevents students from changing their answer based on their peers’ responses. Ensuring that answers are given in unison also maximizes pacing and flow. Show Me can often feel energetic and game-like to students, and their crisp and coordinated participation facilitates the sense of momentum it creates.

In a format that the teacher can assess at a glance. The data in Show Me are actively presented by students in visual form—held up so you can see and scan them quickly from where you're standing; limited circulation required. The clearer you are about what the presentation of the data should look like, the better. You'll want to decide and explain to students whether they should hold their fingers up in the air (so you can see them easily) or in front of their chests (so they are less visible to peers), for example. If they're writing on a whiteboard, are the answers boxed? How high must the whiteboards be held? This is important because the less of your working memory you have to use in searching, the more you can spend analyzing the data.

There are two common versions of Show Me: the first is hand signals, and the second is slates.

Hand Signals

Although there are a variety of ways to employ hand signals, the key to the approach is that on a specific cue, students hold up digits in unison to represent their answer.

In Belanger/Frazier: Show Me Montage, Bryan Belanger uses hand signals to gauge student mastery of a multiple-choice question about rates of change. Within seconds of the morning greeting, Bryan prompts students with the cue “rock, paper, scissors … one, two!” On “two,” students pound their desks three times in unison before they raise their hands to reveal their response (one finger for answer choice A, two for B, and so on). Bryan has made the act of showing him their answers so familiar that this routine goes like clockwork.

Once students' hands are up, Bryan scans the room, narrating what he's looking for (“making sure they're nice and high”) as well as what he sees (“I see lots of twos, a couple of fours”). This reinforces the procedural expectations and reminds students that he's observing carefully. He then asks students to be ready to defend their answer. In doing so, he acknowledges that multiple responses have been given but, crucially, he has withheld the answer (see technique 12, Culture of Error) and not yet told them which one is correct.

Instead of revealing the answer himself, Bryan calls on Blaize (who correctly selected B) to explain his answer and reasoning. He affirms Blaize's answer but also calls on Elizabeth (who incorrectly chose D) to reiterate it. Bryan then asks students to “check or change” their work for that problem, saying, “Give yourself a check if you picked answer choice B. If you did not, circle that, and fix it now.” By insisting that students Own and Track (technique 14), he ensures that they all internalize the answer and the reasoning behind it.

While the multiple-choice format of Bryan's question lends itself well to Show Me, it's also possible to use hand signals to gather data on questions that were not originally designed as multiple choice, as Denarius Frazier shows in the same video. Denarius has written out on chart paper two solutions for a problem that students have been working on independently. He asks students to evaluate the two solutions and then says, “Let's take a poll. We'll reveal on one. One finger if you agree with solution A, two for B. Where are we, in three, two, and one?” Notice how careful he is to ensure that answers are revealed in unison. Thus he is able to instantly read the room and see that students are divided between the two solutions. He sends them into a Turn and Talk (technique 43) to discuss their thinking. Afterwards, Denarius takes another poll to see if their thinking has shifted as a result. He scans the room to assess the new data, and begins the discussion with a student who chose B. Other students share their thinking, and then Denarius shifts focus and asks someone who chose A to explain. Note that he is withholding the answer and managing his tell (see Culture of Error)—students still don't know which is the right answer. Finally, after a student comfortably and confidently changes her answer, Denarius confirms that A was correct. His use of Show Me has allowed him to efficiently poll the room multiple times, note trends in data, and determine which students he should call on when.

In the video Lisa Wing: Boom, Boom, Pow, you can see Lisa using hand signals with her seventh graders. She's asked them to evaluate three anonymous thesis paragraphs written by class members. She reinforces the fun and engaging procedure (boom, boom, pow) and gets really crisp, timely follow-through. She then follows up with questioning, asking students to discuss their opinions. It's a nice example and suggests how you could even ask students to use hand signals to respond to a question for which answers were a matter of opinion. By the way, it's also a great clip because there's so much “reality of the classroom” baked in. Not only do we get to see Lisa's gracious response when she calls on a student who's lost his voice, but there's a story playing out between the two girls in the front row at the beginning of the clip. One girl is proudly telling her friend that one of the paragraphs chosen as an example is hers! It's a lovely scene that reminds us how meaningful it is for students to see their work valued, but it should also remind us how easy it is for students to influence the answers other students give if the procedure for hand signals isn't crisp. The student could just as easily be “helping” her classmate by telling her, “Pick #2.”

Slates

Slates is another form of Show Me in which students complete their work at their desk and then, on a signal, hold it up to show their teacher. Often teachers use small erasable whiteboards to do this, as Dani Quinn's students do in the video Dani Quinn: Show Me, shot at London's Michaela Community School. Notice Dani's consistent upbeat cue for students to show their work (“Hold up!”) and the way she makes reviewing the boards easier by going row by row and asking students whose work she's reviewed to put their boards down. She offers individual feedback to students as she scans, building a Culture of Error by keeping her tone similar whether students got it wrong—“Sam, what's five times five?”—or right—“Bianca, very good.” The impressive number of names she's able to use lets many students feel seen and acknowledged, and we see her reinforce the procedure when she asks for “Boards down” and a faster response.⁸ Finally, Dani does an excellent job of not just gathering data but adapting instruction to that data: “A few mistakes. We'll do one more …”

Slates needn't be done only with whiteboards—you might have students hold up their work in other ways: sketch a line on graph paper; write a sentence defining verisimilitude, perhaps “double spaced” so you can read it a bit easier from afar; add a margin note on page 26. Although scanning the responses might not be quite as simple in those cases, the approach can still be revealing (and effective in supporting accountability).