Explaining something and verifying someone’s comprehension are distinct instructional actions, which makes them easy to conflate. In fact, explaining often feels good, particularly in the beginning. The teacher speaks clearly, the exemplar or model is coherent, the activity order is evident, everything is going well. Then, a student practice begins, and suddenly, the lack of student understanding becomes visible. Some students mimic what the teacher demonstrated but don’t grasp it. Others stare in confusion as the activity advances, unable to figure it out. Others perform the wrong activity altogether, mistaking the superficial activity for the deeper activity.
Explaining is when the teacher provides new information, models a process, or shares a new example with the class, checking for understanding (and building on that explanation) requires teachers to verify that the students can actually do or understand what the teacher has asked or shared. While both elements should be present in a successful lesson, the two actions must remain separate, with teachers ensuring the former is short enough and the latter occurs often enough to provide meaningful student practice and data. It is easy for a teacher to spend too much time explaining, leaving them little time or need to check for student understanding, and even easier for teachers to forget to explain when they could or should explain, resulting in students who are not understanding because teachers forgot to check.
Explaining a lesson can be simple. Teachers explain a single concept at a time, perhaps how to complete one step of a math problem, how to use one specific vocabulary word, how to differentiate two similar concepts, or how to initiate one specific activity. The teacher’s explanation, however, isn’t followed with a whole worksheet or a whole group exercise to check for student understanding. Instead, it’s followed by a question students answer aloud, by a short prompt they complete in writing, by a sentence they fill in the blank of, by a choice they identify between two options, or by a request that they articulate the next step for themselves.
While teachers have a tendency to simply ask “Is everything clear now?” the truth is that this question will always be answered with a yes and will never provide valuable information. Student responses to such a question are influenced by factors outside of their comprehension, such as whether or not the student believes they should, actually want to, or actually did comprehend the teacher’s last words. A better question for checking for understanding is one that is more targeted, asking the student to perform the specific skill listed on their lesson plan objective. If, for instance, the lesson’s stated objective is to identify the main idea in a reading passage, a teacher can ask them which sentence in the paragraph represents the main idea and then explain why they believe so. Similarly, if students need to provide a specific type of critique in their peer writing workshop, they can be asked to rewrite one of their statements into one that matches the desired criteria.
This sort of check, however, should not only happen at the conclusion of a lesson but at multiple points throughout. Students should have the opportunity to demonstrate, either collaboratively with their peers or individually with teacher oversight, that they’ve completed the first step after being modeled that step by a teacher. They should also be given the opportunity to try the next step, on their own, after being guided on that step in a similar exercise. The results of these checks will help teachers determine what they need to cover in the lesson, whether they should review the activity’s objective, whether they can explain another way, or whether they need to use simpler, more descriptive language. They also help to keep teachers on the same pace as the lesson’s activity order and objective and ensure that it does not appear late in the lesson’s schedule that a particular activity or concept requires further explanation, which means there may not be enough time.
The best way for beginning teachers to do this, though, is to look at an already created lesson plan and note all places at which the teacher will provide explanation. Then, add at least one check for understanding after each one to ensure that the students are comprehending the content they need and learning from the activity order. The check can be something that is small enough to be included in the activity order, but specific enough that the teacher will know whether or not the students have actually learned the concept they should from the lesson. This turns a standard lesson plan into a learning plan, one that follows a structure of provide information, have students respond, observe their work, and provide an opportunity to repeat the cycle or correct misconceptions.