Over the last few years I’ve made a habit of teaching demonstration lessons in the schools I work with in order to make it clearer how to teach effectively. One of the things that makes this useful is that I’m always teaching students I don’t know and so, instead of watching a slick performance with students who have been thoroughly trained in the routines of a functional classroom, teachers get to see me work to establish expectations and build relationships in real time.

Recently, I taught a lesson to a Year 10 class in which I was modelling how to use hinge point questions. (If you’re interested in the detail on how I go about this there’s a blog you can read here.) I had taught students the idea that William Blake’s poem ‘London’ and Imtiaz Dharker’s poem ‘Tissue’ both present power as an oppressive political structure which can be reacted to in different ways. In order to check that they had grasped this fairly nuanced point, I asked students to respond to the following hinge point question:

For those unfamiliar with these poems, the unambiguously correct answer is B: London shows power as permanent and unchangeable, while Tissue suggests it is fragile and can be reshaped. However, I’d over-egged the similarities between the two poems and many of the students went for A: Both poems both present political power as an oppressive, all-pervasive force that is immutable, leaving no room for resistance. On exploration it became clear that they had been distracted by the word ‘both’ as they had thought they were looking for a statement which was true for both poems. This then lead to me reteaching the point I wanted them to learn in response to the lesson’s hinge-point.

Later, when we were debriefing, the teacher whose class it was suggested that the lesson had been a failure because the students hadn’t grasped the point I was trying to teach. I tried to explain that the point of teaching is to know, the best of our ability, what students have and haven’t learned. The point isn’t that students can perform in the here and now, it’s that their understanding should be secure elsewhere and later. I’m not sure how successfully I conveyed this point and got the impression that she was still convinced that the lesson would have been better if the students had all been able to answer the question.

As well as modelling, I also get to watch a lot of lessons. All too often, lessons end without  teachers having done anything designed to give them a clear idea about what students think. Although many schools profess to operating a policy of cold calling students to check understanding, this often fails to permeate into every classroom. Many teachers ask too few questions to too few students. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen teachers ask a question, take the first answer given (often from a student with their hand up) as evidence that the class’s understanding is secure, and move on. I make a habit of asking the student next to me if they a) heard the answer their classmate gave and b) if they understood what had been said. Typically, they have little idea of what has happened.

As well as labouring under the pressure of having to cover content at the expense of students’ learning what’s been taught, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that many teachers are nervous of carefully probing their class’s understanding in case they find out students don’t know or understand what has been taught. Lessons are, after all, a performance and if kids ‘don’t get’ what you’ve spent the last hour teaching it’s easy to feel like you’ve failed.

The difference between my poetry lesson and many of the lessons I observe is that I knew students hadn’t understood whereas often teacher either have no idea of their class’s understanding or, worse, have convinced themselves through insufficient sampling that students know things they’re actually still very confused about. It should be clear that the more accurate our understanding of what students are thinking, the better we can address misconceptions and consolidate tricky points.

It may feel exposing to teach in a way that reveals students’ understanding, it may feel like a risk to really probe how many students have actually grasped what you’ve tried to teach but, whether they do or they don’t, it’s always better to know.