Embedded Files
Teachers need to elicit and then analyze evidence of student thinking or understanding to uncover what students already know and can do or what they are learning during a lesson.
Going Deeper Slide Deck
Going Deeper Slide Deck
This slide deck was used with teachers in Whited and Madrone during the 2023-24 school year to illustrate different ways to elicit evidence of student thinking or understanding along with some examples of what this looks like in practice.
Short Videos Showing Teachers Eliciting Evidence of Student Thinking or Understanding
The teacher monitors the progress of groups of students in the curriculum, eliciting information about student learning through the use of diagnostic prompts.
The teacher formatively assesses the individual student to determine her understanding of the processes.
The teacher monitors the progress of groups by asking questions of group representatives which allow him to elicit levels of understanding.
The teacher's question is open in nature and challenges all students to formulate questions and to demonstrate reasoning.
The teacher's questions are of high quality and allow the students time to process before responding.
Most of the teacher's questions are of high quality and asked with adequate time for students to respond. Students share a few of their own thoughts and questions.
Teacher provides a question that creates a genuine discussion among students, then lets them work together to discuss it.
Students assume considerable responsibility for the success of the text discussion, initiating topics and building on each other's ideas.
Practical Ways to Elicit Evidence of Student Understanding
Below is a table with a menu of options. You wouldn't use all (or even many options) in one lesson.
Podcast on Effective QueStioning in the Classroom
Podcast on Effective QueStioning in the Classroom
The hyperlink above contains the link to listen to the podcast along with the transcript if you'd like to follow along with the conversation or just read the discussion. Here's a brief snippet of their conversation:
"The real problem is that teachers tend to ask a question, have the confident, articulate students volunteering to respond, the teacher gets an answer from those students and, therefore, if they give a correct answer the teacher tends to move on. All I'm saying is, if you're only hearing from the confident, articulate students, the quality of your evidence about who is getting it and who is not is rather poor. So the big idea, in terms of classroom questioning, is ‘how good is the evidence you have?' – and if you're only hearing from the confident students, you can't be making decisions that reflect the learning needs of a diverse group of 25 or 30 students. So it's about broadening the evidence base, getting better evidence of what's happening in the heads of the students in the classroom, there and then.
… I think there are two good reasons to ask a question. One is to collect evidence that helps you make decisions about what to do next. The other, of course, is to cause students to think. So, I think that there's a range of things we can do with classroom questioning but, in general, if the teacher is asking a question for the purpose of finding out whether to move on or to reinforce a point, then you need better quality evidence than you can get by hearing only from the confident, articulate students."
Connection with the Walk-Through Protocol
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