Weekly Questions: What did your students learn today? How do you know? How does what you know about your students’ understanding shape what we do next?

 Essential Question: How do we design learning tasks that support all students to be successful?

There are many ways to figure out what your students learn in a day, and I don't think I could begin to list all of them. But if there's one thing I do know, it's that you're probably going to have to ask them about it in order to find out. As teachers, we're always hoping that our lessons work and our students will have learned something new when they leave class for the day, but that won't always be true. There is no way to be sure of anything about anyone else if you don't ask them about it. I truly believe this extends to all parts of life. Assumptions will sometimes fail! Thus, figuring out what students have learned requires input from the students themselves.

One way to figure out what they have learned is to design an exit ticket or wrap-up activity at the end of a class period. Asking students to share what they know now that they didn't know before or to answer some questions relating to the content can give you a sense of the progress that they have made and the concepts they have picked up on. But this assessment doesn't always have to come at the end of the class. You can check in with your students throughout a period to ask them questions, they can fill out a set of questions along the way, or something else. The feedback doesn't have to be only written or only verbal. And it can even change from day to day as to how you gather the information.

Overall, this feedback can inform future lessons, and it is honestly one of the best ways to make decisions about how to move forward. Planning lessons well in advance is great, but sometimes a concept that has one day in the plans will end up taking more than one day for students to learn. Gathering feedback from students each class to figure out if they are on pace with your planning or behind or ahead helps guide how fast or slow you go with respect to your planning the next day.