Learn, Lead, Serve, Blog

A blog by Dr. Brian Bullis. Committed to students through lifelong learning, leading, and serving.

What Are You Learning?

My cover has been blown.

I recently received an email from one of our teachers that read:

“Did you notice how strangely silent they were? They were trying to hear how many times you asked what they were learning. They caught on to the fact that you do that when you come in. We had a big discussion about it a while back. I think they were disappointed that you only asked once. Next time, you’ll have to step up your game!!”

I was doing some classroom walk-throughs and I entered this class.  I noticed that something was off, but I could not quite pinpoint it.  This specific classroom is usually rich with noisy, engaged, collaborative learning.  This day it was eerily quiet.

I cannot take the credit, nor can I remember who deserves the credit (shoot me a message if you know!).  The idea is to ask students what they are learning, not what are they doing.  Asking what students are learning gets to the deeper meaning of their engagement and what they hope to gain through their classroom experiences.  

Here is the beautiful thing about students being aware of this approach.  Once students catch on, like this class has done, we now have a classroom of students thinking to themselves, “what am I learning right now?” when I enter the room.  They were likely doing this already in most classrooms due to the great work of our teachers and now we have one more opportunity to engage in this powerful, important, and necessary exercise.

Looking at John Hattie’s Visible Learning Research there are arguably at least four areas with significant effect sizes that this walk-through questioning strategy could relate to and promote when corresponding with the powerful efforts going on inside the classroom:

  • Teacher clarity – 0.75
  • Summarization – 0.73
  • Goal intentions – 0.48
  • Task value – 0.46

My challenge to all teachers and administrators is to extend beyond asking students “what are you doing” and often ask your students “what are you learning.”  You get some great responses and promote important student thinking in the process.

1 Comment

  1. Brian

    A great reminder. I also like to follow up with “why are you learning it…Why does it matter” and sometimes “How do you know of you get it” if I sense they don’t feel like they’re being interrogated!

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