I am very lucky in that I get to see a lot of lessons. In this series, I share the “most common actions” (MCAs) that I find myself asking teachers to take as part of my feedback. The series starts with the first MCA here. This particular action probably won’t make sense to you unless you read MCA4 and MCA5 first.

In previous MCAs, we have noted a number of issues with teachers taking answers from students calling out or with their hands up. One issue was around a “skewed sample”: these students are extremely likely to know the answer, which means we learn little about class understanding based on them. If the strongest and most able student in the room gets something right, you learn nothing about students at the other end of the spectrum who generally struggle a bit more and find the work harder. Effectively, you cannot infer understanding from one to the other.

Any time you ask a student a question you make an assumption about what others in the room do or don’t know. That assumption is more or less valid depending on which student you ask (sample skew) and how many of them you ask (sample size)

Doing it the other way around, however, can tell us a bit more. If a student who generally struggles and finds things hard gets something right, then – whilst there are no guarantees – it’s much more reasonable to assume that other students understand it too. I call students like these “indicators”: ones who give us a better – not perfect, but better – indicator about the whole class’s understanding.

In MCA5 we looked at two basic rules for targeting your questions and gave two basic rules to help inform your choices. Targeting indicators is the third basic rule and is, in my opinion, the most powerful. Try and identify the rough third of your class who find things a bit tougher, and consider them your indicators. Then, if you ask them a question and they show strong understanding, you can make a better assumption about class understanding than if you had picked a different student.

That doesn’t mean other students never get asked anything. We were clear in MCA5 that everyone should be asked something at some point. But more than that, targeting indicators is best for when you are checking understanding. However, if you are posing a super challenging question, trying to push the learning forward or taking additional ideas or the like, then you can definitely take a hand up or target a student who has a better shot at knowing. If an indicator gets something wrong, hop to a non-indicator and bounce back (which both checks understanding and builds confidence). The idea is to know what kind of question you are asking, and who the best target for it is. Make sure to never ask a student a question if they don’t have a better than reasonable chance of getting it right or at least partially right. Doing otherwise will just induce stress and isn’t very nice.

It’s also worth pointing out that students are obviously completely unaware of the indicator rule. You don’t tell them why you are asking them, and because it is a third of your class and you are making sure you “break this rule” to get to everyone across a lesson, no student ever feels like they are being “picked on.” They just get used to their teacher choosing who to answer.

In the short time, you might find this quite frustrating. You might find that your indicator students are getting stuff wrong and making errors. It’s really important that you note that, because it’s not like up until you started targeting them they understood everything perfectly. They didn’t understand it before: you just didn’t realise.

As such, if they get it wrong then:

A) in the moment respond by either encouraging them, giving them cues or scaffolds so they can get it right, or by hopping back to them later and

B) going forwards realise that you were probably moving too fast and making too many assumptions about class understanding in the past.

As such, our MCA is:

When checking for understanding in verbal questioning
Improve the quality of your inferences
By targeting indicator students

It’s really at this point that we see the power of WHENWHYBY. You don’t always target these students. Sometimes it’s these, sometimes it’s others. But we are starting to think hard about what we are trying to achieve (that’s When and Why) and then figure out straightforward rules to help us achieve that and make better decisions in the classroom (the By).

Before we wrap this one up, it’s important to note that throughout this blog I’ve been cautious with my language. Targeting an indicator increases the chances that we might make better assumptions, but it’s still just a probabilities game. We still have only one student in our sample and make an assumption based on that, and when checking for understanding assumptions kill. This is one part of the reason that I am such a strong advocate of miniwhiteboards – they massively improve the quality of the information you gather by drastically increasing the size of your sample. In addition, whilst I’ve argued that there shouldn’t be any issues to do with students feeling anxious or under the spotlight, MWBs would mitigate any concerns that somebody might have about that. But MWBs will have to be another MCA.

In sum, we have these simple “rules” for targeting:

  • When checking for understanding, target indicators as much as possible
  • Across the course of a lesson, make sure everyone is heard at least once (this might cause you to “break” the first rule at times, but it’s worth it)
  • If a student gets something wrong, come back to them later

There are some others rules too, but in my experience these are the easiest to implement and lead to the biggest gains.

If you are looking for more strategies for targeting students like this, or have been asked not to target certain students for questions, then this may help.

This is the sixth post in a new series called MCA, which stands for Most Common Actions. You can read more about the series here.

The strategies here are heavily influenced by ideas from Teach Like a Champion, Get Better Faster and my boss Thanos Gidaropoulos. Whilst I might not reference every individual thing, assume that if the idea makes sense it is because I got it from one of those sources, and if it doesn’t it’s because I made it up. In this case, I definitely got the idea from Thanos. It’s a tricky one to communicate, so any errors or misunderstanding there are mine.

I strongly advise all teachers to pick up a copy of Teach Like a Champion and all leaders a copy of Get Better Faster.

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