How Do Teachers Know When to Adjust Instruction?

Debbie Cargill
Nov 29, 2010

In an Acquisition Lesson, you will plan for multiple opportunities to assess student progress. With thoughtful consideration, these opportunities become the formative assessment needed to make informed decisions about instruction. The results of the assessments help you determine next steps and/or how to adjust instruction to meet students' needs. When this is done with quality, it impacts student learning in a positive way.

When you wait until the end of a lesson to check for understanding, it may be too late. By then, there is not time to go back and re-teach the whole lesson if most students did not get it. Rather, if you are assessing periodically throughout the lesson, there is still time to quickly take action to adjust instruction if necessary. This process of on-going assessment allows you to decide in a timely manner whether to re-teach, use a different approach, or provide more opportunities for student practice.

Not only are teachers gathering evidence of learning through formative assessment, students gain knowledge about their own gaps in learning. Appropriate feedback helps students to begin to take responsibility for their learning as they use that information to adjust what they are doing. While learning is happening, students need time to talk about, interact with, and reflect on new learning. Summarizing strategies and assessment prompts provides those opportunities throughout the lesson.

Planning for appropriate distributed summarizing and Assessment Prompts requires careful consideration. Questions should be thoughtful, reflective and higher level, rather than recall, facts, etc. A sample of strategies to use when checking for understanding include: think-pair-share, think-ink-share, partner check, justify your answer, reflect on new learning, draw a picture, complete graphic organizer, and write from graphic organizer.