Checking for Understanding and Reteaching Strategies

Throughout our professional development this year we have spent a significant amount of time discussing formative assessment. Most recently, we have discussed checking for understanding procedures and ways to respond to with instruction. Remember, Checking for Understanding consists of two key actions:

While you teach, constantly assess what your students understand. Gather responses from not just one but several students who represent different levels of achievement and performance. Use the data to estimate how many in your class understand and what segments of the class you might have left behind. In this process, ask Cold Call questions with the conscious purpose of sampling understanding. Also Circulate as students do desk work, with the conscious purpose of sampling levels of mastery in written answers. Exit Ticket is yet another technique to use with Check for Understanding.

Respond to misunderstanding by reteaching, and usually reteaching differently.  There’s no point to checking unless you also respond (the more promptly the better) to improve understanding. The shorter the delay, the more likely the intervention will work. 

When thinking about implementing a check for understanding in the classroom, think about the following process:

Select a lesson plan for an upcoming lesson. Note in your plan where you will want to Check for Understanding. Consider:
1. What errors students are likely to make. What misunderstandings may they have?2. The method you will use to check. What question(s) will you ask and how? Script your questions in the lesson plan.
3. Plan (and possibly write down) target student responses. What will you specifically look for in students’ work?
4. How you can standardize students’ work pages so that you can quickly find their work on a particular question (or set of questions).  

For each instance of checking, note what may be your best choice of a way to reteach at the moment.
After class, assess your plan and actual performance in class to improve and broaden choices in your next plan and lesson. In your next plan, include any needed reteaching that you couldn’t do on the spot. Generally, teachers are better at checking for gaps in student mastery than they are at acting on those gaps. Be realistic about where you are, but do plan to improve at filling gaps well and early. 

The following are some strategies that can be utilized to check for understanding, their advantages, pitfalls and challenges, and ways to address those challenges: 

Strategies and Their Advantages	Pitfalls and Challenges	Possible Solutions
Questioning     Immediate     Done during lesson	Right answers from individual students may not equate with whole-class mastery.	Track students’ answers and look for trends.
Observation     Immediate     Independent work- no copying   or piggybacking	Observing students’ work at their seats is likely to entail some delay after the moment of actual teaching. To be effective, observing requires consciously targeting a specific skill question and a valid sample of the class.	Pick one question to target; track responses. Observe during Do Now. Target specific students.
Quick Oral Quiz     Immediate     Done during lesson	The teacher needs to be sure to tap the right sample of students.	Intentionally target students who are high, medium, and low on different skills. Track answers. Cold Call specific individuals.
Hand Signals     Silent     Quick     Whole Class	Students may copy or piggyback.	Ask students go give signals with their eyes close. Ask for hand signals from smaller subset of class.
Slate     Silent     Quick     Whole Class	Students may copy or piggyback.	Explain why piggybacking does not serve the student’s own best interest. Signal the moment when everyone should hold up his or her slate. Have students hold up slates at each step of a problem.
Reteaching	As teachers we may tend to delay reteaching, rather than do it right away after data show a lack of understanding.	Reteach as soon as possible, even if this requires adjusting objectives and lesson plans.

When reteaching, it is important to go beyond "just repeating" the material that was already covered.  Repeating what you did before in the same or slightly different words might work, but some or all students may respond better to some other form of reteaching. In general:

• Act quickly.
• Inform students of what you generally learned from your data.
• Decide to whom you need to respond: an individual, a group, or the class as a whole. 

The following strategies are ways to effectively reteach when a check for understanding reveals gaps in knowledge: 

In an upcoming PLC Team Meeting, we will look at lesson plans and brainstorm strategies that can be used for specific lessons to check for understanding. When planning how you will respond to student misunderstandings, think about the above strategies and how they can help your students. 

What is a Checking for Understanding strategy and reteaching strategy you plan to use in an upcoming lesson? Be one of the first five people to e-mail Mr. Archer (Tyler.Archer@slps.org) for a sweet treat next week!