In the previous post (Five strategies any teacher can use right now to start mastering assessment for learning so their teaching marries up beautifully with their learners’ needs), we looked at five strategies for eliciting information from individual learners.
We also mentioned how eliciting and using information is one of the three pillars of effective assessment for learning (along with opening up success criteria and giving formative feedback).
To recap, when we elicit information from learners, we gain a clearer view of where they are at, and what their needs are.
We can then use this to inform our planning, teaching and assessment.
This helps us to personalise learning and to create a more efficient classroom.
One in which our efforts, and those of our learners, are directed as effectively as possible.
Here are five further strategies you can use to elicit information from individuals:
Strategy 1: Whole-Class Feedback Techniques
You can use any whole-class feedback technique to elicit information from individual learners.
Simply employ one of these techniques having first considered which pupils you are particularly keen to focus on.
You need not convey this to those learners – it may even be counter-productive to do so (for example, it might be inhibiting, or it might make them feel embarrassed at being singled out).
An example is as follows:
You want to find out how three learners who have recently moved into your class are accessing the current topic.
Let us imagine they have joined halfway through the unit of work, and you are therefore uncertain as to whether their understanding is similar to the rest of the class or not.
You plan a review exercise in which you display a series of questions on the board, each accompanied by four answers, labelled A, B, C and D.
For each question, learners hold up a card with a letter on to signal what they think the right answer is.
During the activity, you can pay close attention to the learners in who you were interested.
This involves three things.
First, observing their initial responses to the questions and answers you display.
- Were they nonplussed, or did they seem at ease?
Second, observing what they did next.
- Did they appear to think about the answer, or did they turn to others for help?
Third, observing what answers they displayed.
- Were they correct? Were they identical to, and perhaps informed by, those people sat near to them?
You can follow the same principle with any whole-class feedback technique.
Use it to elicit information from the whole class, but prime yourself to look specifically at the individual learners in whom you are most interested.
Strategy 2: Questioning
Questioning can be used to elicit information from individuals and from groups.
Here are three methods you can use, depending on what type of information you want:
- Targeted Questioning
Decide in advance which learners you will question and what questions you will ask them.
The purpose is to identify who in the class you would like to get information from and what you would like that information to be about.
This means your questioning has purpose.
That purpose is to developed a more accurate picture in your mind of where individual learners are at and what kind of support or adaptations they might need from you.
Bear in mind that purposeful, targeted questioning like this isn’t just about identifying learners who need more support. It is also a useful way of identifying learners who are finding the work too easy and need a higher level of challenge.
- Open Questions
These questions invite learners to talk about their thoughts and ideas.
For example:
- What do you think about that?
- What might the answer be?
- How might you explain that?
Open questions elicit more information than closed questions.
That’s not to say closed questions aren’t useful. They are. Particularly when we want to check knowledge and swiftly assess whether learners have grasped key information.
Open questions, however, provide more scope for developing a nuanced view of what a learner is thinking.
Using them to elicit information from individual learners means framing your questions with the intention of drawing ideas and information out of your learner.
You can then assess the extent to which what they are saying is right, or if it demonstrates an inaccurate or misconceived understanding of the topic.
- Questions based on Bloom’s Taxonomy
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a hierarchy of cognitive processes.
It runs as follows:
- Knowledge
- Comprehension
- Application
- Analysis
- Synthesis
- Evaluation
(Research from the turn of the century suggests swapping the top two levels over and switching from nouns to verbs. Personally, I don’t think it makes much difference.)
The arrangement is hierarchical.
The lower levels are simpler than the higher levels. And, therefore, generally more accessible.
When asking individual learners questions, use keywords connected to different levels of the taxonomy to elicit information about where they are at and how effectively they can engage with the content of the learning.
For example, you might start questioning a learner using some comprehension questions, then quickly move through application and analysis, upon which you find that they are now struggling to answer.
Instantly, you have a rough and ready diagnose of where they are at, in terms of mastering the content, and what you can do to help them achieve the next steps.
Strategy 3: Discussion Tasks
You can set up discussion for pairs, threes, larger groups or for the class as a whole.
The teacher can lead it, individual learners can lead it, or it can take place without someone leading it.
Discussion activities give us a chance to listen to what learners are saying.
If you structure tasks so they include open questions, build on prior knowledge and are sufficiently scaffolded, you will find yourself in a position where all learners in your class are able to talk in detail about the topic (and, if they can’t, that is immediately valuable information you have just elicited, indicating that those learners need additional support).
This means that information is flowing forth throughout the room.
If you are leading the discussion, you might like to focus on specific learners in order to find out what they know and how they are thinking.
The latter is as important as the former.
If a learner is giving correct answers but arriving at them through a misconceived method, these errors may well end up being compounded later on.
If you are not leading the discussion, move around the room and listen to what is being said in different pairs and groupings, focussing on those individuals about whom you are most interested.
For me, this is one of the simplest and most effective ways to elicit information from individuals.
Set up the discussion activity. Ensure everyone is on task. Circulate through the room. Listen in to the conversations that involve those learners you’re interested in. Voila! Useful information elicited.
Strategy 4: Random Feedback
If you ask a question, wait for learners to put their hands up and then choose one of these learners to answer, you will not elicit any information regarding most of the class’s learning.
There are two reasons for this.
First, it is likely that in every class there will be learners who are confident and/or knowledgeable.
Some of these learners seek to answer most questions.
If you allow them to, then you will be ensuring they share their knowledge with their peers, but you will not be discovering anything about the learning and understanding of your other learners.
Second, speaking in public can be intimidating, particularly for children.
Many may be reluctant to put their hands up for fear of embarrassment or for fear of giving the wrong answer.
An alternative method is to use a tool through which learners can be chosen at random to answer questions or share their thoughts.
It needs to be made clear that this is not a way of trying to catch pupils out but is a method through which the teacher can learn more about their class to make their teaching more effective.
Here are five methods you can use to generate random feedback:
- Label each desk with a number. Draw numbers out of a hat at random or roll a combination of dice to choose who is to answer.
- Create a PowerPoint document with the names of all your learners written one per slide. Play this at speed and press escape to stop the slideshow at random.
- Write your learners’ names on lollipop sticks. Put these in a jar and pull them out at random.
- Give learners raffle tickets. Keep the stubs and put them in a hat. Draw numbers out at random. Learners with matching numbers answer the questions.
- Close your eyes and whizz your finger about in the direction of the class. Ask a learner to shout ‘Stop!’ The pupil at whom your finger ends up pointing answers the question. (I used to call this the fickle finger of fate …)
Strategy 5: Model My Thinking
Here I refer to activities where learners can model some part of their thinking so that it is made visible to the teacher.
Give learners in your class pots of Play-Doh or a selection of Lego pieces and ask them to model a concept linked to the lesson or to create a visual answer to a question.
Another option is to have a collection of scrap materials in your classroom.
Learners can use these to create sculptures that represent their learning, their understanding of a concept, or which answer a particular question.
These types of activities can be used with groups and, inevitably, involve the whole-class providing the teacher with information about their learning.
They are included here because they provide a good opportunity for the teacher to focus on what specific learners produce using their modelling materials.
In addition, the teacher can talk to and question these learners about that which they have created.
For example, you might ask the whole class to model the answer to a question, but then focus on what is created by three or four learners about whom you want to know more.
A classic scenario you’ll often see when you do this, is one or two learners who have no idea what to model.
Sometimes this is a confidence issue and they simply need a bit of prompting to get started.
But sometimes it gives you an instant, profound understanding that those learners have not understood the learning in the way your thought they had.
And that is information on which you can immediately act.
