Educational Leadership - September 2015

Every teacher I’ve ever met knows that no lesson plan survives the first contact with real students. And yet most teachers plan their lessons as though they’re going to go perfectly. They plan them on the basis of assumptions they know to be false.

I’d like to suggest a small but powerful modification: Because lessons never go according to plan, teachers should build plan B into plan A. This involves designing a lesson with a “hinge” somewhere in the middle and using specific kinds of questions—what I call hinge questions—to quickly assess students’ understanding of a concept before moving on.

The Rationale Behind the Hinge

When planning a lesson, the teacher identifies a particular concept that will be important for students to understand before moving on to other parts of the lesson. Of course, there are many such points in a lesson, but at least to start, choose one point somewhere in the middle of the lesson. At this hinge, the teacher asks a hinge question to check that the class has understood this key point of the lesson and gets a response from every single student. Depending on those responses, the teacher either moves on or goes back to review the material.

There’s nothing new in this idea, but it turns out that it’s rather difficult to do well. Here are some principles that teachers may find useful in designing effective hinge questions.

PRINCIPLE 1. Get a response from every student.

Teachers have always used questions to judge the
level of a class’s understanding before making a
decision about whether to move on, but getting evi-
dence about the whole class is difficult. For example,
if a teacher wants to check whether students can
recognize adverbs, he or she could ask the students
to identify the adverb in a sentence like this: The boy
ran quickly across the street. Teachers often ask stu-
dents for a choral response (Hunter, 1982). However,
that makes it difficult to tell who is responding cor-
rectly and who is just miming convincingly. In other
words, the teacher doesn’t have good evidence about
who has and hasn’t understood.

The teacher could, of course, ask each student
in turn, but this takes a considerable amount of
time, and students are likely to be influenced by the
responses of other, higher-achieving students. One
way to avoid this is to have all students respond at
the same time by using finger voting. The teacher
might ask students to identify the adverb in this
sentence:
The boy ran quickly across the street.
(A) (B) (C) (D) (E)

Students can hold up one finger for A, two fingers for B, and so on, to indicate their choice. One of the important features of finger voting, or using ABCD cards, is that if a student hasn’t made a choice, it’s obvious to the teacher.

PRINCIPLE 2. Do a quick check on understanding,
instead of engaging in extended discussions.

When teachers first start using hinge questions, they often find it difficult to interpret student responses; they’re not sure whether a correct answer means that the students have truly understood. Although they might think that they could just ask each student to explain his or her answer, they actually never do this because, in a class of 30 students, it would simply take too long.

For the question to work as a quick check on understanding, it shouldn’t take up a lot of time. Teachers should design the question so that it takes students no more than two minutes to respond, and