One of the ways I have used in classes to get a quick snapshot of how well children are understanding things is the thumbs up thumbs down approach advocated by Assessment for Learning gurus like Dylan William. You ask the children to put their thumbs up to indicate how well they feel they are understanding things. Thumbs up means they get it, thumbs sideways means they think they get it but aren’t sure, and thumbs down is they’re struggling.
I’d always thought it was quite an effective tool, but a recent experience has made me doubt it.
I’m in hospital at the moment, after an operation, and one the questions they have asked me during recovery is how much pain I’m feeling. To help me, they asked me to put it on a scale of 1 to 10, where one is no real pain and 10 is agony. (I should add here that this is not a complaint. Apart from one ludicrously self-important nurse, the care here has been outstanding. Really, truly outstanding.) Anyway, putting the pain on a scale of 1 to 10 is quite hard. It is hard because I wasn’t sure I had enough experience to know what pain rated as what. Having an arm sawn off, for example, sounds like it’s 10. Or breaking one’s spine. At the same time I didn’t want to downgrade my pain, because that would mean less morphine, tramadol et al.
It occurred to me that the same might be true for the children being asked to rate their learning. Do they feel they have enough experience to rate it confidently? Equally importantly, are they aware enough to know that their own understanding may not be a ten out of ten. (Ben Goldacre has a wonderful graph of levels of ignorance – those who know, those who know they don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know). The reason this matters to me is that, if they aren’t giving sensible feedback, then it limits the effectiveness of any help I can give. I either overdo or underdo the morphine.
Which leads to another parallel. In hospital, they’re keen to get you off the morphine as soon as you can manage it. Perhaps it should be the same in schools. Perhaps we teachers should be aiming to get students off the adult help as soon as they can manage on their own.