Check for understanding though student goals and self assessment.

Have you ever been faced with blank stares where you know some of your students just aren’t getting it? I have! I have also had students who I felt understood concepts before I even started teaching them. You know, the ones who constantly have their hands in the air to answer your questions or the ones who seem completely bored. How can you find out who gets it, who is completely lost, or who is somewhere in the middle?

I began using student goal and self assessment journals where I can easily check for understanding. These journals have been a game changer and I am so excited to share all about them today!

Why Do We Need to Check for Understanding?

I often found myself asking, how do I know my students understand what I am teaching? For my first few years of teaching, I didn’t know. I found myself waiting until the end, and by then it was too late. I would hand my students an assessment and watch some of my students fail and I had no idea they were so lost. This is why checking for understanding is imperative! Checking for understanding provides me with opportunities while I’m still teaching to improve student learning by reteaching concepts as needed. This is a simple process that allows me to verify that my students are learning what I am teaching them WHILE I am teaching and I have never looked back!

Check for Understanding with Student Goals and Self Assessment

What do we want our students to learn? Rather it be academic, social, or emotional, we all have goals for our students.

Before I begin a lesson, I explain to my students what are goal or objective is and how we are going to get there. We first read and glue our goal into our reading or math goal journal. My students lightly color in their level of understanding using a crayon in the pre column. This means they are indicating their level of understanding before I teach the skill.

Check level of understanding with reading and math goal journals!

This provides me with the opportunity to see what students have little or no background knowledge and what students have a good understanding of the skill I am going to teach. I will quickly walk around to see my students’ level of understanding. This quick self assessment allows my students to see where they are currently at and will help students take control of their own learning. We will come back to these journals when we are finished teaching the standard.

One year, I didn’t include pre and post sections. I simply I had one section to check my students’ level of understanding at the end. They colored in the corresponding box and provided in an example at the bottom. This work just as well, but I like having something to compare my students’ level of understanding from start to finish.

I keep all my student goals in a binder. I created pages with tabs to split my reading and math goals into sections based on standards. I place a clear adhesive pocket (I picked mine up from Target in the dollar section during back to school time) over the written goal squares. At the beginning of the year or during the summer, I print and cup apart all my student reading and math goals. I place the goals in the clear pocket and when it comes time to teach the skill, I grab the goals out of the pocket. I will admit, this takes some time to organize it, but it is SO WORTH it! This could also be a great project for a parent volunteer to help with. You could have everything printed and the volunteer could place the adhesive pockets on, cut apart the goals, and place the goals in the pockets.

Check for Understanding While You Are Teaching

It is also important for me to check for understanding while I am teaching the standard. Every day (at least I try to) in the middle of our lesson or after our lesson, I check for my students’ understanding in some type of way. This is usually something very simple! Most the time if I want to check for understanding during our lesson, I have my students use these levels of understanding rings. The rings contain mini levels of understanding posters. My students can quickly flip to the card that shows their level of understanding. I can easily look around the room and gauge where my students are at and make lesson adjustments as needed.

Easily check for understanding use mini level of understanding posters!

If I’m checking for understanding after our lesson, I will usually use these levels of understanding posters. I tape the posters to the wall and place clear pockets under the posters using sticky clips. After our daily lesson, I will ask my students a question and they will answer it on a small piece of paper and place it in the clear pocket according to their level of understanding. After everyone is done, I take a quick look to see where most of my students placed their paper. Later I will take the papers out to check my students’ work. This works similar to an exit ticker or ticket out the door.

I have used some other very simple techniques to check for understanding as well. These include…

Dry Erase Boards - Ask a question or post a problem on the board and have students write their answer on the board.
Hand Signals - Students hold up a number according to their level. For example, students will hold up 2 fingers if their level of understanding is at a 2.
Four Corners - This gets students up and moving! Mark your four corners in your classroom with numbers, agree, disagree, etc. Ask a question and students will move to the corner with their answer.

You can find the editable Student Goals HERE.

You can find the Levels of Understanding Posters HERE.

I hope you found some new and engaging ways to check for understanding! I have found great success using self assessments and student goals and I hope you can as well! If you have any questions about what I shared today, please reach out.

Happy Teaching!

Here are some of products I used in this post!

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