Check-ins are one of my favorite classroom routines that I depend on year after year. A Check-in is a quick set of questions at the end of a lesson that tell me what students know and what they still need to know. It’s like an Exit Ticket, a popular formative assessment of many teachers, but with my own special twist that makes it unique!
Check-ins help me know what my students need help to understand, and how I should tweak my next lesson to their needs.
Keep reading to learn more about this valuable routine in my classroom:
- What is a Check-in?
- How is a Check-in unique?
- Why I use Check-ins
- Why Check-ins work
- How I assign and grade Check-ins
- Sometimes I use Exit Tickets
- Give Check-ins a try! (example Google Forms provided!)
What is a Check-in?
A Check-in is a type of formative assessment, usually one or a few questions, targeted towards the learning goal of the lesson. It tells me what students know and don’t know at the end of a lesson. It is one way to check for understanding.
I usually give a Check-in at the end of a lesson, but it also works great as a Warm-up, after a lecture and notes, or really anywhere in the lesson! It is a check for understanding that can happen at any point in the lesson. It’s just an overall great classroom routine that I use year after year, for any grade, 6-12! Check out my blog post 8 Classroom Routines & My Go-To Lesson Structure for Better Classroom Management to read more about Check-ins as a classroom routine.
It is important to gauge students’ understanding so that I can clear up any misunderstandings, and reteach if necessary. If I skip this step, students can be even more lost and confused when I try to move forward and build on the information from that lesson.
How is a Check-in Unique?
A Check-in is my own special spin on an Exit Ticket. What’s special about it? Students can take the Check-in as many times as they like, and their highest score is recorded. As far as I know, I coined the term “Check-in” as my own way of checking in with students and to check for understanding.
You might be thinking, Check-ins don’t seem unique, aren’t they just an Exit Ticket? But I guarantee that to students, they are unique! They LOVE that they can re-take them and still get a 100% in the grade book. So far, I haven’t worked with teachers who use this strategy, and the practice is novel to students.
Another feature of my Check-ins is that I use Google Forms to provide instant feedback for incorrect answers. Why wait until the next lesson to clear up a misunderstanding? With instant feedback for incorrect answers, student leave my lesson with an immediate firmer grasp on the lesson and learning goal.
Why I Use Check-ins
Check-ins are an effective way to measure and assess learning. I use Check-ins because they are fast to administer and easy to grade.
When I set it up right, Google Forms does the grading and provides feedback to students for me! A Check-in tells me who might need extra help, or if I need to re-teach a concept to the entire class.
I love how a Check-in provides instant feedback so students get to see right away if they really get it. Because students can take them over and over, students can learn from their mistakes.
Check-ins provide an opportunity for students to improve their grade. Is there any Extra Credit?? No! But you can go back and do your best on the Check-ins to improve your overall Quiz average!
As an extra added bonus, Check-ins create a pool of questions that I can use later on a Quiz or Test.
Why Check-ins Work
I always teach better the next lesson after checking-in. It can be tough to touch base with 35 students in 60 minutes, but a Check-in is one way I can consistently connect with every student and their learning, every lesson.
Check-ins are super effective at assessing knowledge. They help me gauge what students got from the lesson and what they still need.
Check-ins provide instant feedback. We close a lesson and students leave the classroom knowing what they got and what they didn’t get.
When students retake a Check-in, they show learning. Even if they answer the same questions. When they get it right the second time, it means they learned something.
As an added bonus, Check-ins have a built-in incentive for students to try and retry until they get it right. They can improve their grade, and students love that! Many students are motivated to learn and improve their grade when the opportunity is there for them.
How I Assign and Grade Check-ins
The fastest and easiest way to assign and grade Check-ins is to use Google Forms and post the Check-in as an assignment in Google Classroom. I make sure to save it as a draft, and then publish it when I’m ready. Otherwise, students can see it early, take it, and bug me about it when I’m trying to focus on other things. If there is a 1:1 relationship for devices at my school, then I have students take out their device at the end of the lesson to do the Check-in.
If I ask questions and provide the answer choices, I can design the Google Form to do the grading for me! Then all I have to do is download a spreadsheet of the responses, and plug them into my digital gradebook. I like to write explanations as feedback for incorrect answers, that way students can instantly learn from their mistakes. I like to write feedback for correct answers as well. Something like, “Great job working towards mastery on Mendelian Genetics!” or “Good job!” I usually allow for students to view their results and the feedback immediately after submission. The release of results can be delayed until later as well, and sometimes I do that as well.
I try and communicate clear expectations for the due dates. I make sure students have several opportunities to re-take and improve their score. If students finish a lab or classwork early, they can go and improve all of their recent Check-in scores by retaking them.
At the end of the quarter or semester, students are looking for ways to improve their grade. With Check-ins, they can optimize the opportunity to improve their Quiz average by re-taking them. Despite deadlines, I just go with it. I’m happy that they make the effort to go back and retake them. It means extra work for me, but until Google Classroom will let teachers archive an assignment, it just leaves too much ambiguity and I want my students to get credit for their time and effort. Even when it’s late.
Sometimes I Use Exit Tickets
You’ve probably heard of another type of formative assessment, the Exit Ticket. They are are also known as a Ticket out the Door. It’s usually on a little piece of paper, and students solve a problem or answer a question. “How are you feeling after today’s lesson?” “What questions do you have about today’s lesson?” It is supposed to be just a quick glance to let me know if my lesson and teaching were successful.
I found several downsides to using Exit Tickets. For one, it is yet another thing I need to collect and review. That’s 150 extra little papers to go through and evaluate in one day. I know a lot of teachers don’t grade Exit Tickets, they review and sort them to get a big picture. But students want to know if they are getting it. They especially want the validation. So another downside is if I don’t grade them, then I am missing out on an opportunity to provide feedback, and I feel like it leaves students hanging.
Give Check-ins a Try!
Check out my Check-ins below, access my Google Drive folder to see more, and give them a try! Just make sure to make a copy so you can edit the form to your preferences and have the results sent to your email address. I will share more Check-in’s like this as I create and share more of my lesson ideas!
Let me know if you have any questions by leaving a comment. I would love to hear from you! To read more about me and my classroom, check out the blog posts below!
https://howsheteaches.com/2022/10/21/list-of-vocabulary-terms-for-high-school-biology
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