How checking for understanding can guide your teaching in the moment

Checking for understanding is a core part of effective feedback. Not feedback to pupils, but feedback from pupils to teachers that helps teachers decide what to do next.

In the previous blog, we explored how teachers use evidence from pupils to guide adaptive teaching. Here, the focus is on how that evidence is gathered, through checking for understanding.

What matters when checking for understanding

EEF’s Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning guidance emphasises that effective feedback depends on strong foundations. Clear learning intentions help teachers decide what to check for. Checking for understanding approaches help reveal where pupils are secure and where there are gaps or misconceptions.

As Dylan Wiliam reminds us (EEF, 2021, pp.5) feedback is most effective when it is approached systematically, beginning with eliciting the right evidence about what pupils understand.

Effective checking for understanding often rests on three shared principles:

• Anchor checks to learning intentions, so responses are meaningful rather than routine
• Gather evidence from all pupils, not just volunteers.
• Create conditions where mistakes are safe, so pupils are willing to share ideas.

The goal is not to ​‘do’ a particular technique. Techniques can be effective, but they are not evidence-based in isolation.

The evidence shows that what matters when checking for understanding, and how techniques are used, is to reveal pupils’ thinking and use that to inform decisions about what to do next.

Refining what you already do

The examples below show one way familiar techniques might be refined, by focusing on a single essential step. Doing this can support effective checking for understanding and guide what happens next.

Questioning

• Identify an essential step
  I need evidence from across the class before deciding what to do next. 
• Refine the routine
  I build in protected thinking time: adding a short pause, paired talk, or quick jot before selecting pupils to respond. 
• Make it consistent
  When thinking time is routine, questioning gives me a more trustworthy picture of the class and allows more pupils to experience success. 

All-pupil response systems (mini-whiteboards, ABCD cards, finger voting)

• Identify an essential step
  I need a response from every pupil to see how secure understanding really is. 
• Refine the routine
  I make sure everyone commits to an answer before revealing it. For example, using ​“3, 2, 1, show me” or asking pupils to write answers and keep them hidden until prompted. 
• Make it consistent
  When answers are always committed and revealed together, patterns of understanding become visible rather than masked by copying or hesitation. 

Hinge (diagnostic) questions

• Identify an essential step
  Different answers need to tell me different things about pupils’ understanding. 
• Refine the routine
  I design the response options in advance, so each one reflects a specific misconception or level of understanding, rather than being simply right or wrong. 
• Make it consistent
  Planned this way, hinge questions help me decide whether to pause and fix, adapt support, or move learning on. 

Taking the next steps

A helpful way to approach this is to focus on one habit at a time:

• Identify one essential step
  What really matters for eliciting useful evidence? Choose one step to focus on. 
• Refine the routine
  Make that one deliberate change to part of the routine you already use. 
• Make it consistent
  Repeat it until it becomes ​‘just what you do,’ an effective habit. 

Small refinements to practice can improve the quality of evidence teachers gather.

It can help you decide when to pause and fix, adapt support, or move learning on. This is how feedback does its most important work: guiding teaching in the moment.