“Any questions?” “Get it?” “Right?” “Make sense?”

As a K-12 student, how often did you hear these prompts and others like them? Are you ever tempted to ask similar questions of your students?

Great teachers know that it’s what students learn, not what the teacher teaches, that determines their students’ success, but it can be challenging to measure student learning effectively “in the moment.” Prompts like those above represent attempts—ineffective attempts, but attempts nevertheless—to formatively assess students’ knowledge and skills. In other words, these prompts represent good intentions to get a pulse on student learning before the conclusion of the unit or lesson so that the teacher can improve her own instruction and provide students with meaningful feedback.

But you can do so much better.

In this course, you will deepen your understanding of why we check for understanding, learn and practice methods for checking for understanding effectively “in the moment,” and learn and practice ways of adjusting your instruction after checking so that your students are learning more every minute of every day.