We have a "no hands up" policy in school which has the aim of ensuring that all children must be prepared to answer a question at all times. This is, however, not always useful when you wish to gauge understanding. In my classroom, I use thumbs up, thumbs middle and thumbs down to get an idea of how the students are dealing with certain aspects of the lesson; "I can conjugate the verb jugar in Spanish - thumbs up, thumbs middle, thumbs down." This is much more effective than "hands up if you can conjugate jugar" as I can see who needs further support or explanation and I often use my thumbs up students to then work with the thumbs middle students while I work with the thumbs down students.
On a similar thread, I use a very simple TUTMTD word document to monitor progression through a lesson. I put my objectives into statements in text boxes in my TUTMTD document and, as a class, as the start of the lesson we go through the statements and do TUTMTD, which gives me a visual representation for the whole class of where we are at, we then drag the text box over the appropriate thumb!
The really powerful aspect is that we can come back to the document at the end of the lesson and move the objectives text boxes, hopefully towards thumbs up. This gives a visual representation of progression throughout the lesson. I can also see where we have not made as much progress and take that into account in my planning for the next lesson. Please feel free to Download the word template I use to get you started.
Love the thumbs Chris, so excited to hear you talk all about this kind of thing on Wednesday, you legend.
Posted by: Lesley | November 24, 2008 at 07:57 AM
Love thumb Chris, so excited to hear you talk about this kind of thing on Wednesday, the legend of you.
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Thank you so much for the template. I am using it to create a rubric for student self-assessment in kindergaten.
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