You ask whether everyone has got it. The same four hands go up. The rest look at their books, and you move on without knowing whether the other twenty-six followed the second half. A starter, one check in the middle and an exit ticket get you an answer from all thirty, for about four minutes of the lesson.
Putting your hand up is a public bet that you are right, in front of the people you sit with at break. The children willing to make that bet are the ones who least need checking. So the sample you collect is the one that tells you least, and silence from the rest gets read as agreement rather than as the two or three different misconceptions it usually is. A whole class check removes the bet. Nobody can see who put what, nobody has to go first, and thirty answers arrive in the time hands up gets you one.
Six here, but no lesson wants all six. Take the starter, one check from the middle and the exit ticket, and you have added about four minutes. The topic below is heat and insulation because it carries a famous misconception. Swap in your own content and keep the shapes.
A starter, not a test. Run it as multiple choice rather than a quiz so nothing is marked — you want the wrong answers, because the second option is the one you will spend the lesson teaching against.
Shows the vocabulary the class arrived with, which is rarely the vocabulary you assumed. Ten seconds of typing, and you can pick a word off the board and build the first explanation out of it.
Now it is marked, because you have just taught it. Put the misconception in as a wrong answer — a check where every distractor is obviously silly tells you only that they can read.
Recall questions ask what they remember; ordering asks whether they understood the method. It also fails in a readable way — a class that puts step one third has a specific gap, not a low score.
Read this next to the quiz. High marks with low ratings usually means they guessed well, and that is worth knowing before you set the homework.
The exit ticket. Three minutes before the bell, answers on your screen before they are out of the door, and the two most common ones are the starter for the next lesson.
A bar growing in front of thirty children recreates hands up exactly: the undecided watch the leader and join it. Collect first, reveal after, and the split you see is the one they actually held.
The value of a check is in the distractors. If you cannot name the misconception you are hunting, the question will come back green and tell you nothing you can teach with.
Pairs have to agree before they answer, which means the reasoning happens out loud in the room. Where phones are not allowed, a set of school laptops or tablets works the same way — the code is typed in, not scanned.
Build the questions once, put the code on the board and leave the room open through the lesson. Anything that needs a login per child, or an install, gets abandoned somewhere in week two.
Children check. Once they have worked out that the wrong answer costs them nothing in front of the class, the starter stops being a performance and starts being data.
They take four minutes to read for a class of thirty, and they are the only part of this that changes what you teach rather than what you know. Collecting them and not reading them is worse than not collecting them.
Every question above, ready to edit into your own topic. Change the wording, put your own distractors in, and show the code on the board.
Poll a hall of three hundred and find out who is lost before you move on
Discussion questions that start with everyone already committed to a position
Find out what the class understood while there is still time to act
Give remote students the same way in as the people in the room