Checking for Recall and Understanding

I would say that this is often one of the weakest areas of practice in teaching in relation to how important it is: checking that students know and understand what we think we have taught them.

If I tell you something or explain something to you I want to be sure that you’ve understood it now and are also beginning the process of learning it – by which I mean getting it into your long term memory. Unless I check, I don’t know.

I always think an abseiling instruction session is useful to consider; a scenario John Hattie is fond of. If I want you to abseil safely, I’ll show you how to attach your carabiner to the harness and rope with some modelling and explanatory talk – and I’ll want to check you can do it yourself before I let you launch off the cliff: I’m not going to assume you got it just by listening. I’m not going to assume you got it just because you say ‘yes, I’ve got it’. I’m going to check. I want you to show me. If I’m teaching a group, I’m not going to assume that if the one person who puts their hand up first gets it right, I’m safe to assume that everyone else gets it too. I want to check everyone. And if I want people to abseil independently later, then I’m going to check they can still fix the carabiner correctly tomorrow and again and again – to be sure they’ve really learned it and are not just performing based on short term recall.

Why is this a common weakness? Because it’s complicated. We are giving our instructional messages to lots of people simultaneously and it’s hard to get the ‘message received’ feedback from everyone. But that’s what we need to try to do. Time and logistical pressures mean that we have to balance methods designed for eliciting feedback from the whole group with some sampling methods that give us an indication of the range of responses from individuals.

To read the full blog post visit: https://teacherhead.com/2017/09/09/teaching-fundamentals-checking-for-recall-and-understanding/