Once students' thinking has been prompted, teachers need to gather responses from students to see what they've learned and help them to make meaning from the material.
Below are four strategies teachers can try in order to surface students' thinking and gather their responses to learning prompts.
Create an idea tracker for students to monitor and assess their thinking during the activity. For example, this Claim Support Connection thinking tracker uses a Project Zero Visible Thinking Routine and an essential question or big idea posed at the top. Students jot down their claims about the source, supporting evidence and either questions or connections based on this evidence. Questions are useful for pursuing further research while connections are practical for reviewing previous lessons or making explicit connections to a text book.
Assess student responses while students see how their ideas are similar or different from other students. Ideas should be shared from all members of the class. Avoid calling on hands as a first routine for gathering student responses. Begin with a group or individual routine and then call on hands for additional responses. Routines that use the share out method are: Domino Discover and Show and Share.
Group student responses into patterns to determine the next steps of the lesson or student groups. Gather and Group is different from Share Out because individual student responses are sorted into categories as part of the gathering process. This enables teachers to respond to the patterns during lessons versus taking student responses home and sorting them and then returning a day or two later to respond to student differences. Because individual student responses are written down and saved, teachers and students may return to original responses for reflection. The routines, Rumors, Four Corners, and Where Do You Stand? use the Gather and Group method and get students moving out of their seats to share their thinking with classmates.
Invite students to generate responses on a focused topic or question through discussion in small groups and receive written feedback on their responses through Around the Room. For around the room, you will post a topic, photograph, data table, question, map—any prompt that you would like students to discuss and record their responses. Students form small groups at each station, discuss, and document their responses on chart paper or a laptop. Then students rotate, reading the responses of other groups and contributing feedback to the original responses. This rotation continues “around the room” until students have participated in discussion on the needed topics. Together as a class, you and your students can look for patterns across student responses to the different prompts. This is a great way to introduce or review units, a time in the curriculum where you both want to activate student knowledge and get them remembering what they know and at the same time further student knowledge through peer discussions. The teacher benefits from time to listen to student conversations around the room. The routine, Idea Carousel, uses the Around the Room method.