Every lesson you have to answer one question: who is keeping up, and who has fallen behind? Most teachers reach for a short quiz, and a quiz is expensive. It eats teaching time, it makes children anxious, and by the time you have finished marking it several days have gone by. An informal check gives you the same answer inside a minute, and the class never realises it has just been assessed.
Five Checks You Can Run Live
- Finger votes: ask a question with two options and have the whole class hold up one finger or two at the same moment. One sweep of the room shows you what proportion of the class has it. Ask them to close their eyes first if you don't want copying.
- Everyone holds up an answer: children write on a small board or a scrap of paper and hold it up on your signal. Everybody has to answer, so there's nowhere to hide quietly.
- Exit tickets: a scrap of paper on the way out of the room with one thing they learned today and one thing that still confuses them. That little pile is next lesson's plan, already written for you.
- Teach a partner: put children in pairs and give each one a minute to explain what they have just learned. Anyone who can explain it understands it. You walk round and listen, and that's your data.
- One extra question at the end: slip a question a step harder than the lesson onto the bottom of the worksheet. A child who gets it is ready to move on. A child who gets everything else but not that one is pitched exactly right.
Closing the Loop With What You Find
A check is only worth doing if the answer changes your teaching. If half the class is lost, don't move on next lesson. Go back over it with a different kind of activity, not the one that just failed. If only three children have fallen behind, hand that group the easy version while everyone else works at the usual level. Worksheets that come in three levels for the same topic exist for precisely this.