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

Technique 11: Affirmative checking
Check for understanding

A final tool that can help you use observation to check for understanding, Affirmative Checking, involves the strategic use of checkpoints where students must get confirmation that their work is correct or on target, and that they are ready to move on to the next stage—a new paragraph, a second draft, a harder set of problems, the last step in a lab. In many cases students determine their own timing for doing so, which can create opportunities for self-assessment.

You can see Hilary Lewis using the technique in her first-grade classroom in the video Hilary Lewis: Green Post-It. This clip appeared in previous versions of the book and is one of our longest-serving clips at workshops; we continue to use it because Hilary does such a beautiful job of gauging student mastery before independent work. She's warm, attentive, and exudes high expectations. She asks students sitting on the carpet to complete a math problem on a green sticky note, which she calls a “ticket.” Students must show that ticket to her as proof that they're ready to start independent practice (IP) at their desks. She stokes their interest in a perfect first-grade way by comparing this to the experience of “going into a movie.” By requiring students to “earn” the opportunity, she turns IP into a kind of reward.

When the first student comes to have her work checked, it looks for a moment like a race is on to get in line first. Students start to scramble to show Ms. Lewis their work, but Hilary checks that trend in a loving voice: “Scholars, the only way you can come up here is if I ask you to come.”

One by one, students complete the problem and await Hilary's signoff. She calls them up, first individually and then row by row. For correct work, she responds, “Go get started” in a warm, quiet way. Not unexpectedly a few students have done the problem incorrectly—or perhaps hastily—to which Hilary responds: “Please go back and check your work.” Her reaction is emotionally constant. When one student shows her work for the wrong problem, Hilary uses the same warm, supportive tone: “OK. You did your own problem, which is great. I need you to do that problem” [as she points to the board].

Having everyone complete a gatekeeper problem before they move on to the full problem set lets Hilary correct small misunderstandings and reinforce working carefully and it helps students see that they are “ready” for a larger task, when they work carefully and attentively.

You can see a useful adaptation of this idea with older students in the clip Jessica Madio: Silent Hand When You Have It. Flipping the idea of an Exit Ticket, which her seventh-graders at St. Athanasius School in New York City are familiar with, Jessica uses an entrance pass prior to a section of independent practice. Getting it right shows you're ready to work on your own successfully.⁹

Jessica has Standardized the Format so answers are easy for her to find and assess quickly, and she tells students to raise “a silent hand when you have it. I'll come around and I'll check it.” Instead of checking students based on seating plan, Jessica has given students agency over when their work will be checked. They are familiar with this routine and jump into the problem on cue. As each student finishes and raises a hand, Jessica simply says, “Thank you,” and checks off the problem if it's correct. Students then transition immediately to independent practice problems without additional directions. Of course Jessica is also using Active Observation and taking notes on which students struggle and why. She uses this data to call a handful of students to work at the back table with her. These students have all made a similar mistake, and so they get additional support while others work independently. When they appear to be able to solve on their own, she sends them back to practice independently. Jessica offers a great reminder that classroom differentiation starts with data gathering.

One of the nice things about Affirmative Checking is the avenues to self-assessment it can create. Affirmative Checking offers students an opportunity to gauge their own work and decide when they are ready for the teacher to evaluate what they've done. This empowers students to assess their own work first—Am I done? Do I feel ready for the next step?—before asking for a response from the teacher. Because students elect the moment they'd like feedback, Affirmative Checking gives us additional data on student thinking about their own work that we might not see when we're reading over students' shoulders (“Oh, I see—you thought this was finished, but let's think about …”). Like Stretch It (technique 17), it can contribute to a culture in which correct answers are rewarded with future challenge—for example, “Great, now you're ready to move onto some advanced problems.” That sense of accomplishment from seeing themselves pass through checkpoints successfully also help students develop confidence. Their progress is made more legible to them.

One of the keys to using Affirmative Checking effectively, however, is minimizing or eliminating the time students spend waiting for evaluation. The time students spend with a hand in the air, waiting for a teacher to come around (or even less productively, arms folded, pencil down, chatting with a neighbor) is a waste of precious instructional time and a risk that students will lose both their momentum and train of thought. The following tips for designing effective Affirmative Checking will help you balance student independence with efficiency.

Consider whether the content of your lesson is conducive to staged checking. The checkpoint(s) should ideally pass quickly—recall how efficient Hilary is when she reads each sticky note. If student work requires lengthy analysis or detailed feedback, it may not be feasible to ask everyone to wait for the next step while you read and respond.

Have a rubric or an answer sheet ready even if the work appears pretty straightforward. This will free working memory and speed your ability to process.

Consider how long each student might need to complete the task. Work would ideally be challenging or complex enough that students would tend to finish at different times, spreading out the checking required of the teacher so there was less waiting. Affirmative Checking might work well in writing classes, for example, where students typically complete drafts at very different paces, staggering the checkpoints from the teacher's perspective; however, it would be important to keep the check focused. You won't be able to read each student's first draft but you could ask students to circle five dynamic verbs or two indirect quotations or their thesis paragraph.

It can be helpful to add optional work. If you gave students three problems in one stage of a problem set but made the third a bonus question (or extra credit, perhaps), you could start checking students who had completed one or two. If students finished simultaneously and had to wait, they could go on to the third problem while you checked others' work. This might sound contradictory—isn't the point here to check before you go on? The difference is that the third problem would be at the same level of difficulty as the first two, so it would create an extra buffer of (productive) time in which you could complete your checking.

You may also consider making the signal for “I'm ready” the sort of cue that students can give while continuing to work. Keeping his or her hand in the air for three minutes makes it all but impossible for the student to go on to another problem. But an index card that's green on one side and yellow on the other, for example, can be flipped to show “I'm ready to be checked” while continuing to work on the bonus problem.

Another way to increase efficiency is by combining Affirmative Checking with Show Me, having students hold up their work for you to sign off on. You can see this in the video Jon Bogard: Go to IP, in which Jon uses whiteboards to dispatch some students to independent practice and to require more guided practice of others.

Student-Driven Affirmative Checking

Another approach to Affirmative Checking is to allow your students to own more of the process of checking for accuracy and then present the data to you. Students could self-check on a key you provide and report their results. Or they could be responsible for checking one another's work in partners and then report the results to you, which would reduce the number of checks you needed to make. This works best when it relies on objective rather than subjective assessments.

One important fact to consider if you have students participate in Affirmative Checking is that there are two key purposes to the technique. One is to make sure that students are successful before going on to more complex work; the other is for you to gather data on how your students are doing. Distributing the checking accomplishes the first with more efficiency, but risks reducing your access to the data: If students self-check, will you know how they did? I'm sure you will find a way to balance these goals—either by using student-centered checking sometimes and checking yourself other times, or by engineering ways to track the data during student-centered checking (or both). For example, if students self-checked against a rubric, they could check a box to show how they did so that you could track it later. It's just important to be aware of the challenge and the possible trade-off as you're out there adapting and designing new and better solutions.