Checking for Understanding & Feedback
Don't Ask "Got It?"
Swap 'got it?' for a question only someone who has got it can answer
Use this when
What is it?
Don't Ask "Got It?" is a replacement habit rather than a new routine: wherever you would ask students to rate their own understanding ("got it?", "everyone okay?", "any questions?"), you ask a small question about the content instead, one that every student answers. The swap matters because students tend to judge their own understanding poorly, and those who are most lost are often the least likely to say so in front of the class. A question about the content cannot be answered with a polite nod.
The steps
- Count your self-report questions for one lesson. Ask a colleague to keep a tally during a drop-in, or record twenty minutes of your own teaching. Count every question that asks students to judge their own understanding: "got it?", "okay?", "does that make sense?", "any questions?". Most teachers expect two or three and find closer to ten.
- Choose the one you say most. Nearly every teacher has a favourite. Convert that one first and leave the others alone for now.
- Write the replacement before the lesson. A replacement asks about the content, and every student answers it. Test it at planning time: a student who has misunderstood should be unable to answer it correctly. Conversions that work: "Got it?" becomes a quick question on Show-Me Boards ("Boards up: what's the first step?"). "Any questions?" becomes "Ask your partner one question about this. I'll take the two best." "Everyone okay?" becomes a planned Hinge Question whose wrong answers reveal which idea is missing. "Does that make sense?" becomes "Tell your partner the two steps we just did, in order."
- Swap at the moment the urge arrives. The urge to check tends to arrive at predictable points: after an explanation, before independent practice, at the end of a worked example. Keep the moment and change the question.Boards up before we move on. Question three: write the first step only. One, two, show.
- Act on what the answers show. Scan the answers and count roughly. If nearly all are right, say so and move on. If one wrong answer is popular, address that idea by name. If wrong answers are everywhere, reteach the step straight away.
- Keep the "how are you finding it?" conversations. The swap removes self-report as your evidence of learning, and nothing more. Asked one-to-one while you circulate, "how are you finding this?" still builds trust and still tells you things worth knowing. Treat the answer as information about how the student feels, and check what they know with a content question.
What it looks like
On Tuesday a colleague kept a tally of Mrs Deakin's questions for her: eleven self-report checks in fifty minutes, mostly "okay?". Today, teaching balancing equations to her class of 14-year-olds, she finishes the explanation and gets as far as "Does that make—" before stopping herself. "Boards up instead. Balance this one: hydrogen plus oxygen making water. One, two, show." Twenty-eight boards go up; nine have doubled the wrong number. "Thank you. Keep them up." She copies one wrong answer onto the board, without a name attached, and the class corrects it together.
Ten minutes later the old habit slips out whole: "Everyone okay?" The class nods, exactly as it has been trained to. She laughs, adds a tally mark in the corner of the board and asks again properly: "Fingers up: how many water molecules do we finish with?"
How you’ll know it’s working
- The tally falls. A colleague who counts again after three weeks finds one or two self-report questions where there were once ten.
- The predictable checking moments (the end of an explanation, the moment before practice) now end with boards, fingers or a written line, and every student produces one.
- Wrong answers surface during the lesson and sometimes change its direction, and the teacher can say roughly how many students gave each one.
- The whole-class nod disappears. When a check arrives, students reach for a board or a pen instead of glancing around.
Pitfalls & fixes
- Changing the words, keeping the question. "Everyone confident?" fails in the same way "got it?" fails, because it still asks students to rate themselves. Test every replacement: could a student who has misunderstood still answer it with a yes? If so, convert it again.
- Replacing self-report with a volunteer. "Who can tell me the first step?" collects one confident student's answer and tells you very little about the other twenty-nine. A replacement counts only when every student answers: boards, fingers, paper or a partner.
- Converting every tic at once. Ten new checks in one week usually collapse to none by the next. Change one habit, run it for a fortnight and then move on to the next.
- Collecting answers that change nothing. If the lesson carries on identically whatever the boards show, students notice and stop thinking before they hold their boards up. Decide at planning time what you will do if a third of the answers are wrong.
Weigh it up
Why it’s worth it
- You find out who can actually do the task while the lesson can still respond, and the information comes from everyone rather than from volunteers.
- It costs nothing to adopt: the swap needs no new resources or lesson structure, and the checks it produces need no marking.
- Each replacement question doubles as retrieval practice, so checking for understanding also strengthens memory.
- Participation spreads across the room, because every replacement format asks all students to answer rather than only the confident few.
- Writing replacements sharpens the explanation that comes before them. To write a question that only a student with secure understanding can answer, you must first pin down exactly what secure understanding looks like for this idea.
The costs
- Evidence takes longer than a nod. "Got it?" takes two seconds, while a boards question takes a minute or two, several times a lesson. The minutes have to come from somewhere.
- The answers bring obligations. Once you have seen that a third of the room is lost, you have a decision to make, and on some days the scheme of work leaves no room for the reteach.
- Speech habits resist change. You will hear "okay?" leave your mouth for weeks after deciding to stop, and inviting a colleague to count your tics takes some nerve.
Adaptations
- Early years / lower primary: the tic often appears as "thumbs up if you understand", which is still self-report. Keep the thumbs and change the question: "thumbs up if the big hand is on the six."
- Secondary: make the tally a department habit. Pairs of teachers count each other's self-report questions during drop-ins; the counts stay private, while the best conversions are shared.
- Post-16 / adult: with adults, "any questions?" is a courtesy as well as a check, and is sometimes taken up. Keep it as a genuine invitation at the end of a session, and run your evidence check before it, so that silence is not your only data.
- Practical subjects: "is everyone okay to start?" asked before equipment comes out is a safety check, and it stays. Convert the learning checks instead: "before anyone lights a burner, show me on fingers which step comes first."
Where this comes from
Doug Lemov codified this swap for schools as 'Reject Self-Report' in Teach Like a Champion. Two findings sit beneath it: students' judgements of their own understanding agree only moderately with reality, which is why the answers to "got it?" are worth so little; and teaching improves when it responds to evidence of what students currently understand, which is what the replacement questions provide. The habit-conversion recipe itself has not been trialled as an intervention: the well-evidenced part is how unreliable self-report answers are, while the steps for replacing them are professional craft.
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