Technique 18: Check for Understanding

(Part of Chapter 3 Structuring and Delivering Your Lessons)

First, the author says this should be called "Check for Understanding and Do Something About it Right Away", but that is too long of a title :-).  

The first part of this technique is Gathering Data.  You need to gather data to see if what you are saying is being understood -- and you do this, obviously, by asking questions.  But, the interesting point here is: if you ask one question and the one student who answers it gets it right, it doesn't mean that all students have understood.  Or, if the one student gets it wrong, it doesn't mean all students have not understood.  So, you have to gather data better.

This can be done by asking more, similar, questions, or by asking certain students you know to be representative of different abilities.

By thinking of answers to questions as data, you will probably ask far fewer "yes-or-no" questions, as these have a higher possibility of false positive answers.

Another great way to gather accurate data is to use some kind of "polling technology" -- like the "clickers" we have available at Calvin (which I haven't used in the past).

The second part of this technique is to fix the problem when you discover that some portion of the class does not understand what has been taught.  This can be done by reteaching what was taught, teaching it in a new way, reteach just the steps in the lesson that were not understood, etc.

My response:

I ask far too many yes-or-no questions, and I don't treat the answer to a question as a single data point -- I've made the mistake of thinking one answer is representative of all the class. I need to spend more time coming up with sets of questions by which I can get better data on understanding from the class.

Technique 17: Ratio

(Part of Chapter 3: Structuring and Delivering Your Lessons)

Your "Ratio" is how much of the "work" your students do in the classroom: how much thinking, how much writing, how much analyzing, how much talking, etc.  If you do all the talking (i.e., you lecture), your ratio is 0.  The author does not consider this a good thing, it seems, as he says the champion teachers have high ratios -- i.e., they don't just lecture.

Methods for increasing your Ratio:

1. Unbundle: break questions into smaller parts, and aim the various parts at multiple students.
2. What's next?: ask students about the process of solving a problem, not just the ultimate answer.
3. Repeated examples: ask students for multiple examples (of situations you are talking about).
4. Rephrase: have one student rephrase another student's answer.
5. Whys and Hows: have a student explain why or how an answer is correct or incorrect.  This takes the discussion to a deeper level and pushes understanding deeper.
6. Batch process: allow students to respond to others' statements, without the teacher's intervention.  But, don't let this go too long, and don't let the focus wander.
7. Discussion objectives: keep the questions/discussion focused on the learning objective of the day.  

The author notes that there is a difference between a ratio and a productive ratio.  "Releasing students to solve a problem that requires a skill they hadn't learned or mastered yet, in the hopes that they might infer that skill by trying, would result in students doing a lot of thinking but not a lot of productive thinking." (97)

My response:

I like this and I try to do this, in general.  I'm trying to get more and more away from the strict "lecture mode."  One of the methods the author suggests excites me especially: the Repeated Examples method.  I can see asking students in CS106 (intro programming) to give repeated examples of certain if-else clauses, or if without and else clause, or if-elif-else clauses.