It’s happened to every teacher I’ve ever met. You put together a great lesson, one that you are sure will engage the attention of your students and draw them in to explore some new concept or idea. After teaching the lesson and providing opportunities for students to engage, you confidently pass out the exit slip, a final question they are to submit before lunch.
A few hours later, you’re in your prep period and you can’t wait to see what your students learned through the exit slip exercise. You’re especially excited to read the answer of the boy who kept nodding and smiling throughout the lesson. You read the first slip and it doesn’t quite hit the target. An outlier probably. You read the second slip, written in clear, elegant cursive. Wrong again. Not even close. You decide to read one more…enthusiastic boy’s. Surely his exuberance was indicative of some understanding. But alas, one sentence in, and your heart sinks. The great lesson you engineered turned out to be dud.
John Wooden, legendary basketball coach of the UCLA Bruins, put it best: the most crucial task of teaching is differentiating between “I taught it” and “they learned it.” A teacher can plan a tailored lesson and wax eloquent with the rhetoric of Cicero, and yet, if his students can’t demonstrate the knowledge for themselves, real understanding hasn’t been achieved.
In order to avoid the futile lesson, the one in which students can’t actually demonstrate evidence of learning, teachers need to check for understanding, not simply at the end, but throughout the lesson. The notion of “understanding” is what I’ll be exploring in today’s article as I contribute to my ongoing series on Teach Like a Champion for the classical classroom. Teach Like a Champion, or TLaC, is a handbook on optimized teaching techniques procured through countless hours of observation of master teachers. Let’s dive in and first consider humanity’s innate drive for understanding in the first place.
The Desire for Understanding
The desire for understanding isn’t anything new. King Solomon asked specifically for this gift when the Lord visited him in his early days as king. God appeared to Solomon in a dream and offered to grant him a desire, presumably, anything he wanted. Reflecting upon his status as the king of Israel and the son of David, Solomon made an intriguing, and perhaps even shocking, request: “Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil, for who is able to govern this your great people?” (1 Kings 3:9).
An understanding mind. Of all the things he could have asked for of his sovereign creator, Solomon asked for understanding. Although he was new to the throne, Solomon seemed to grasp the significance of his role and the complexity that lay before him. He grew up watching his father David navigate the troubles of kingship in the ancient Near East (although to him, the geo-temporal region in which he lived wouldn’t have struck him as ancient, near, or eastern). He understood that the road before him would be very difficult.
As we know from the story, God not only granted Solomon his desire for understanding; He blessed the young ruler with riches and fame as well. And yet it was Solomon’s wisdom and understanding that truly set him apart among all the kings and queens in the region. As the author of 1 Kings recounts:
“And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand of the seashore, so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt. For he was wiser than all other men…and his fame was in all the surrounding nations. He also spoke 3,000 proverbs, and his songs were 1,005. He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish. And people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the kings of the earth, who had heard of his wisdom.”
I Kings 4:29-34
While we don’t fully know how Solomon gained his understanding, in terms of pedagogy, what the author does emphasize in this passage is the sheer breadth of it. Solomon wasn’t simply wise on matters of daily living or ruling; he was learned in both the human and natural sciences. This is a rare combination indeed. In our modern world, it would be difficult to find someone proficient in both poetry and ornithology. King Solomon was a renaissance man living in an Iron Age.
The Association of Ideas
Understanding begins with desire and comes from God, but now we will see that it flourishes through relation. John Locke, the great British philosopher, political theorist, and medical researcher, helps us understand why. He famously wrote An Essay Concerning Human Understanding which laid the groundwork for empiricism, the theory that all knowledge ultimately comes from experience. Locke’s goal in the essay was to explore the limits of human understanding and provide criteria for distinguishing between truth and falsehood. While empiricism itself is a contested theory, his insight that ideas are associated, or interconnected, is profound.
For Locke, ideas are the things that furnish the mind and they initially enter through experience. Until a human begins to sense the world, her mind is a tabula rasa (a blank slate). According to Locke’s theory, all ideas are the result of either sensation (experience) or reflection. For example, until a child experiences the color blue, she has no idea of it. But then the mind begins to reflect on these simple ideas, gained through sensation, in order to generate more ideas. So a child may reflect on the idea of blue and the idea of a spherical object in order to grasp the idea of a blue ball. In this way, ideas are associated, and understanding is the network of these associations.
Knowledge as a Unified Whole
Interestingly, Charlotte Mason hones in on a similar idea to association in her definition of education as “the science of relations.” Here she has in mind the notion that as children experience the world and gain knowledge of it, each facet of knowledge is interconnected. Mason writes, “Our nature craves after unity. The travail of thought, which is going on to-day and has gone on as long as we have any record of men’s thoughts, has been with a view to establishing some principle for the unification of life. Here we have the scheme of a magnificent unity” (School Education, 154). For Mason, education is the result of seeing knowledge as this “magnificent unity.”
In an excellent blog article, author Karen Glass expounds upon Mason’s philosophy, writing:
“Charlotte Mason saw that this vital, unified understanding, which she did not hesitate to call “wisdom,” has the potential to produce great ideas, great works, and great understanding. One critical point, from an educational perspective, is that there is no need to divide our ideas of knowledge into “sacred” and “secular.” When we recognize that the Holy Spirit is the source of all knowledge, and interests himself even in the truths of arithmetic, geometry, and grammar, our focus shifts. Knowledge is not an unpalatable medicine to be forced down by any educational gimmick we can contrive. Knowledge is a gift of God, and the question becomes therefore, what methods can we use which will invite His cooperation in the education of our pupils?”
Here Glass makes clear that all domains of knowledge are unified because they share a common source: the Holy Spirit. As teachers teach for understanding, they need to retain this theological truth. Knowledge is not some commodity that should be bought and sold on the market for the most expedient price; it is a gift from God graciously given for the good of humankind. Just as God gave Solomon knowledge of humanity and nature, so will He give generously to students as we invite His presence into our classrooms and teach in a way that is befitting to His children.
Check for Understanding
With these philosophical and theological considerations of understanding in view, we can now begin to reflect as teachers on how to cultivate and check it. Admittedly, in TLaC, author Doug Lemov isn’t concerned in developing his epistemology, or philosophy of knowledge. For his purposes, a pragmatic approach will do: understanding is simply the desired commodity for college acceptance. But now that we, as classical educators, have explored a deeper understanding of understanding (no pun intended), we can glean from Lemov’s field research in a way that better aligns with our core values.
In the first edition of TLaC, “Check for Understanding” was presented as a single technique, but over time Lemov came to see how comprehensive this task really is for effective teaching. So in the second edition, Lemov provides ten different techniques for teachers to implement in order to check for understanding. These techniques coalesce for Lemov around three broad tasks: data gathering, culture of error, and acting on the data (25).
Gather and Act on Data
Data-gathering, the first task, needs to occur frequently and efficiently. All too often, teachers proceed through their lesson without regularly checking in to see if students are actually tracking with what is being taught. When teachers finally do check in, say, through an exit slip, it’s often too little, too late. At this point, they aren’t able to course correct.
This leads to the second general task teachers can employ to check for understanding: acting on the data. Writing thorough lesson plans is important, don’t get me wrong, but one of the best parts about teaching is that the lessons themselves have a degree of unpredictability. We are working with humans after all. Teachers therefore need to regularly be checking in with their students to gauge their present understanding and determine if a course correction is necessary. This could manifest itself as re-teaching a particular concept or providing an additional opportunity for a student to practice a skill.
One of the best ways we have found for gathering and acting on data is through the practice of narration. When students are regularly called upon to “tell back” what has been taught or read, the teacher learns in real time what the student knows and doesn’t know. The teacher can then determine how to tailor the follow-up discussion for optimal learning to occur.
Build a Culture of Error
The third task to implement in order to check for understanding is building a culture of error. This sounds unintuitive perhaps, but the reality is that students are going to make mistakes. The question is, how will teachers respond when they do? There are really only two options.
The first is to respond negatively to the incorrect answer as a means to discourage future incorrect answers. But this approach is wrongheaded. If a culture of “right answers only” emerges, then the teacher will never be able to gather reliable data. She will have created a culture in which faux answers are given, not what students are actually thinking, errors and all.
The solution is to cultivate a culture of error, which, as Lemov puts it, is to “…make it safe to be wrong” (25). In fact, he recommends as part of the “Plan for Error” technique to expect errors. This way teachers aren’t caught off guard by an incorrect answer and instead can remain consistently flexible throughout the lesson.
Another practice Lemov recommends is to praise risk-taking (71). This strategy leverages the idea of a growth mindset, one that views intelligence as a developing, rather than fixed, trait. This step is crucial for encouraging students to ask their questions and risk being wrong. Rather than leading students to believe that their intelligence is fixed to their classroom performance, teachers should cultivate a growth mindset in which students believe their intelligence can grow through hard work and perseverance.
Conclusion
Doug Lemov may not be operating from a classical framework, but his techniques related to checking for understanding are right on. His focus is on cultivating the understanding of the student, which I’ve shown is crucial for not only academic success, but flourishing as a human being.
Here are some example statements teachers might make to regularly check for understanding in the classroom:
- “Take out your whiteboards and write in a complete sentence the reason you think the events of last chapter affected the present situation.”
- “I’m really glad that you made that mistake. It’s going to help me to help you.”
- “I love the fact that this is a hard question and that I see so many brave hands in the air. Thank you for taking a risk.”
- “This is a tough question. If you’re struggling with it, that’s a good sign. Now, who will be bold and start us off?”
You can read about all ten of the techniques for checking for understanding in the second edition of Teach Like a Champion. My personal favorites are “Reject Self-Report,” “Show Me,” and “Excavate Error,” but I recommend giving all of them a try.
I’d love to hear what techniques others have found helpful or what questions you might have. Reply in the comment section below!
Other articles in this series:
“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 1: An Introduction
“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 2: Teacher-Driven Professional Development