What’s on the Checking Understanding poster
Weak checks against Real checks, side by side.
- Weak checks: Does everyone understand?
- Weak checks: Any questions?
- Weak checks: Hands up if you got it
- Weak checks: Nodding and eye contact
- Weak checks: Circulating and looking at three books
- Real checks: Every pupil answers at the same time
- Real checks: Mini whiteboards held up together
- Real checks: A diagnostic item with real distractors
- Real checks: Cold calling across the whole class
- Real checks: Sampling books from the weakest first
- A check is only a check if a plausible result would change your next move. Otherwise…
Pupils cannot reliably report their own understanding, and confident wrong answers are common. Ask them to do something, not to rate themselves.
Questions about the Checking Understanding poster
- What’s on the Checking Understanding poster?
- Weak checks against Real checks, side by side. Weak checks: Does everyone understand?; Weak checks: Any questions?; Weak checks: Hands up if you got it; Weak checks: Nodding and eye contact; Weak checks: Circulating and looking at three books; Real checks: Every pupil answers at the same time; Real checks: Mini whiteboards held up together; Real checks: A diagnostic item with real distractors; Real checks: Cold calling across the whole class; Real checks: Sampling books from the weakest first; A check is only a check if a plausible result would change your next move. Otherwise…. Pupils cannot reliably report their own understanding, and confident wrong answers are common. Ask them to do something, not to rate themselves.
- Who is the Checking Understanding poster for?
- Checking Understanding belongs to the Education section rather than to a school year, because humanities is not something one grade owns. Anyone learning classroom practice can pin it up — a beginner, a student mid-course, or someone revising years later.
- When should you use the Checking Understanding poster?
- Use it at every point where continuing would waste the time of half the room. A wall chart earns its place by being glanceable from where the work is happening, so Checking Understanding belongs on the wall where that humanities work actually happens, within glancing distance, rather than filed away.
- What other posters go with Checking Understanding?
- Questioning, A Behaviour System and Cutting Load In A Lesson sit alongside Checking Understanding in the Education section. Printed together they make a wall rather than a single sheet, which is how a reference set actually gets used.QuestioningA Behaviour SystemCutting Load In A Lesson
- Is the Checking Understanding poster free to download and print?
- Yes. Checking Understanding downloads as a free PDF with no account, no email and no watermark, like everything else in the Education section. Print as many copies as you like for a home, a classroom, a library or a tutoring group; reselling the file is the only thing the licence rules out.Read the licence
- What size does the Checking Understanding poster print at?
- Checking Understanding is a vector PDF laid out for US Letter, and prints on A4 with Fit to page — the same file, no separate download. Because every mark on it is drawn rather than photographed, it stays sharp enlarged to A3, A2 or A1 at a copy shop. Colour carries emphasis only, so a greyscale print of Checking Understanding loses nothing.Printing guide
Related posters
Charts that sit alongside Checking Understanding on the same wall.
Browse every Education poster, or start from the full catalogue.