Don’t assume they know – why checking for understanding matters.

In years gone by, before I became interested in applying educational research and cognitive science to my practice, the extent to which I checked for understanding in the moment involved asking the class a question, and taking an answer from one student who happened to have their hand up. And if the rest hadn’t understood, well, no matter, because they had just heard the correct answer from the self-selecting student, so now they all DEFINITELY understood! And on I moved with the content of the lesson.

In a time-constrained classroom, where content at GCSE is huge, it can be tempting to fall into this trap. After all, taking time to check that everybody is making sense of new information AND acting upon it if they are not, takes up valuable lesson time.

However, the question surely needs to be, not can I afford to spend time checking for understanding, but can I afford NOT to? With cognitive science allowing us to understand how mental models (schema) are built, the implications of students being sped through lesson content without the teacher checking how this content has landed, risks resulting in students building misconceptions, having gaps in knowledge or worse, completely floundering and getting left behind. We know that students make sense of new content in light of what they already know. If, for example, I am teaching a class 4 figure grid references and then move onto teaching them 6 figure grid references, without first checking that they have understood and are able to use the former, then if and when my 6 figure explanation yields little success, I will have wasted valuable time and the lesson may as well not have happened.

Such checks provide teachers with rich, live data which can be acted on in the moment if that knowledge is crucial for the understanding of the content to follow, or addressed at a later date if it is not.

In future blogs, I’ll talk through practical ways that we can ensure our instruction has landed in the way that we intended through the use of such techniques as choral response, mini whiteboards and other simple wins which allow us to see inside the minds of our students and make learning visible.