Your teaching will only marry up with learners’ needs if you know what those needs are.
That’s where eliciting and using information comes in.
Eliciting and using information is one of the three pillars of effective AFL, alongside opening up success criteria and giving formative feedback.
For more on this, see my blog ‘What is Assessment for Learning? A Guide for the New, the Familiar, and the Perplexed’
Eliciting information from individual learners is all about developing a more accurate understanding of their learning, their needs and where they are at.
Armed with this information, the teacher can tailor their planning, teaching and assessment so it is personalised, helping to speed up the learner’s progress.
When eliciting information from individual learners, there are many techniques we can call on.
Common to all of them is a desire to draw out information that is useful to us, the teacher.
Starting with this in mind means you are in a position to think critically about how you will elicit information, as well as the kind of information to which you want access.
Here are five practical strategies any teacher can use to elicit information from individual learners.
And remember, this is the cornerstone of effective assessment for learning.
The starting point for us making our teaching and our classroom more efficient and better tailored to the learners in front of us.
Strategy 1: Circulating and Talking
Circulating refers to the teacher walking around the room.
The metaphor draws on connotations of liquids or gases moving freely and flexibly within a structure.
It also suggests a route in which all areas of importance are visited (consider the body’s circulatory system).
It is not always possible for a teacher to circulate.
A class prone to disruption may require long periods in which the teacher is at the front on a watching brief.
In such circumstances you may want to sit learners who you feel will benefit from individual attention at the sides and at the front of the room.
This makes it easier to access them while trying to keep an eye on the class as a whole.
Circulating simply requires the teacher to walk around the room and to talk to learners.
The conversations elicit information the teacher can use to help learners or to make adjustments to their teaching.
Try and talk to as many learners as you can. That way, you will be checking the understanding of most of your class.
Should this prove difficult, plan beforehand which learners you will visit.
It may be the case, for example, that some pupils need reassurance when starting a task whereas others have a tendency to get bogged down halfway through.
Use such knowledge as you possess to inform your strategy.
But have a strategy.
This means you have a purpose guiding you as you circulate.
Think about what information you want to elicit and who you want to elicit it from
That way, you’ll be best placed to adapt your teaching in the moment, to better meet learners’ needs.
Strategy 2: Circulating and Not Talking
An alternative approach is to circulate without talking to learners.
Instead, you will be listening, observing or reading their work.
These three approaches offer different ways to elicit information from individual learners.
They depend on learners doing particular tasks – you cannot read their work if they are doing a discussion activity.
You might like to plan a range of tasks in your lessons with these methods in mind.
Alternatively, you may choose to make use of them whenever suitable opportunities arise.
When learners are engaged in discussion, you can circulate and listen to what is being said.
You can choose to focus on specific learners, to make comparisons between learners, or to get an idea of where the class is at based on a sample of individuals.
When learners are working, whether it be in pairs, groups or individually, you can observe them as you circulate.
You can look for specific things or ask yourself question.
For example:
- Who looks engaged in the task?
- How is Learner X choosing to approach this?
- What body language is Learner Y giving off?
If you set a task in which learners are required to do some writing, you can read what they have done as you are circulating.
You can head out into the class with a particular set of learners in mind whose work you want to read, or you may have a focussed question, such as:
- Are pupils responding to the task as I expected they would?
In all these examples you should talk to learners if the results of your listening, observing or reading suggest it would be useful.
The strategy is about alternatives to talking, not its negation.
Strategy 3: Marking
Marking work is one of the most common ways to get information about where individual learners are at and how they are accessing the learning.
You can consider the short-term, medium-term, and long-term situation in the following ways:
- Short-term
Marking the most recent work that learners have done allows you to analyse how they are dealing with the current topic.
You might plan your marking so that it takes place after lessons or sequences of lessons with which you feel learners might have difficulties.
This means you are best placed to act on the information you elicit by revisiting challenging topics, or by working with those learners who have struggled while letting the rest of the class move on.
- Medium-term
Comparing learners’ most recent work with what they have previously done gives you a sense of how they are developing over the medium-term.
You might be able to pick out trends that need to be addressed or things that deserve praise.
Here we see that what we decide to look for is key in terms of the information we elicit.
If I am not thinking about the medium-term when I’m marking, then I probably won’t see change over time in the same way as if it is a priority in my mind.
Knowing your focus before you start to mark means framing your marking so it reveals the information you want it to reveal.
- Long-term
By recording marks in a mark-book and comments on a strengths and target sheet stuck in the front of learners’ books (or you might opt for a sheet that just covers targets), you will be able to build up a long-term view of individual learner progress.
One of the advantages of using a target sheet, or a strengths and target sheet, is that it also allows the learner to keep track of their progress.
This means formative feedback doesn’t get lost in books.
It also means you can instantly see if you are giving your learner the same written feedback as you gave them previously.
Which is a sure sign that they have either chosen not to implement your feedback, or you have not given them the opportunity to act on it.
Again, it is all about your focus when you are marking.
Deciding what you are looking for causes you to see certain things and skim over others.
Strategy 4: Reading and Not Marking
As a teacher, you can feel compelled to mark books every time you look at them outside of a lesson.
This is not necessarily required.
First, because useful feedback is more likely to be provided when there is a good amount of work on which to base a judgement.
Second, because to mark many books very frequently can be inefficient – it is better to mark the same number of books at regular intervals and to provide richer feedback on each occasion.
If you can get past the compulsion to always mark, you will be able to pick out books belonging to certain learners and read them in between lessons to elicit information about where they are at and how they are getting on with their learning.
A great deal can be gained from reading through a workbook that belongs to a learner you are concerned about or who you feel you do not know that well.
The key is to look at their book on that occasion in order to elicit information.
Leave the feedback for another time.
Strategy 5: Written Conversations
When you mark a learner’s work, you might like to include one or two questions in your formative feedback.
These will help you to start a written conversation with the learner.
Questions should be related to the learning and might take one of the following forms:
- Questions of clarification.
- Questions in which the learner is being asked to expand on their answers.
- Challenging questions designed to push the learner’s thinking.
- Questions that draw on a specific part of the learning with which you feel the learner is struggling.
- Reflective questions that encourage the learner to tell you about their feelings and experiences in relation to the learning.
You will need to give learners time to answer your questions when you return their books.
This method can be particularly good for eliciting information from pupils who, for whatever reason, do not like to talk in class.
It is also useful for communicating with learners who lack the confidence to speak at length about their learning.
You don’t need to wait until the next time you mark learners’ books to read their responses.
For example, imagine I mark my learners’ books, include some questions in my formative feedback, and then return the books.
I might start the lesson by saying:
- OK, five minutes to have a look at your feedback. Once you’ve read it through, I want you to write a paragraph in response to the question I’ve given you. Off you go.
Later in that same lesson, I can identify a handful of learners I’m particularly interested in, visit them, and read what they’ve put.
This gives me instant access to information I can then use to update my view of those learners, and to adapt my teaching in the moment, or my future planning.
In all five of these examples, the emphasis is on purpose.
As the teacher, we need to be clear in our minds before we begin on what information we want to elicit, and from who we want to elicit it.
Acting without purpose will make you less successful.
And that means you won’t be as well placed to adapt your teaching and your future lessons in light of the increased knowledge you have about where your learners are at.
In short, know what you want, choose the strategy that helps you get it, then use it in a way that is helpful to you and your learners.
