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.