based from Harry Fletcher-Wood (Head of History)

Harry Fletcher-Wood, head of History and CPD co-ordinator at Greenwich Free School: @HFletcherWood

Using hinge Questions: I would not have believed that a major improvement in my teaching last year would have involved employing multiple choice questions. As I learned, however, multiple-choice hinge questions are a sophisticated and invaluable assessment technique to swiftly check whether the class has understood a critical point before moving on.

Crucially, the teacher designs responses to ensure student answers unambiguously demonstrate their underlying reasoning.

As a history teacher, for example, I might wish to know whether students appreciate what I mean by ‘significant.’ If I asked, ‘what is significance?’, one of the responses I would offer would be ‘achieving something which improves people’s lives’. Students frequently perceive significance to be synonymous with greatness and therefore would not deem a tyrant significant.

By designing each choice to represent a different line of reasoning, it is possible to immediately identify misunderstandings and take corrective action. If a lot of students have fallen into this trap, I may offer a brief example, or if it’s a handful of pupils, I might have individual conversations. The hinge question is a key tool in ensuring students have understood a topic before a lesson ends.6 creative ways to use questions in the classroom