Learning or Teaching

My good friend Adam Holman constantly reminds me of a nagging question in education, "If the student isn't learning, then is the teacher teaching?"  It is a fair question.  I feel like many times our focus as educators is lost in the instructing of students and not so much in the learning done by students.  In our day and age of teacher accountability, we are not held accountable for teaching the content to the students but for our students learning the content.  Many times it is difficult for us to enter this paradigm shift.  I know for myself, I would leave campus after a long day of work frustrated that my students didn't understand what I just taught them.  I would look for something or someone to blame (other than myself of course).  When we took benchmarks and the scores weren't as high as they should be, I would be upset.  "We covered this" "I know I taught this" "We talked about this just yesterday"  What I failed to think about was did the students learn it.  How did I know whether the knew it or not?  If they didn't learn it, did I keep teaching without making adjustments? 

Mike Schmoker in his book Focus keys in on the most important teaching strategy that teachers can use in the classroom.  He says that if teachers can do this one simple thing, learning will be accelerated and in 9 months teachers can average more than 2 years of academic growth with their students.  What is the strategy?  Simply checking for understanding of all students.  THAT'S IT! How can it be that simple.  When you think about it however, it is much more complex than that.  There are a multitude of strategies that can be used however to check that all students understand and learn the content throughout the lesson.  Some of my favorite strategies for checking for understanding are: Think Pair Share where I walk around talking to the students as they talk to their partners, Students answering questions using individual white boards, quick writes and exit tickets, Interactive Clickers systems like through CPS, Thumbs up Thumbs down, and Four Corners.  These all gave me the chance to immediately check in with students and see what they learned from the lesson and what they still needed more support in.  What are your favorite strategies for checking for understanding?

To truly support our students, we must understand what they are learning.  We have to give them a chance to show us what they are learning.  If we are just going through lessons and having the kids take notes without regularly and intentionally checking to see what each student has learned in the lesson, we will teach, but the students might not learn.  Does that mean we have taught?