Best practices are intended to support multilingual learners (MLs) in all classes, no matter their proficiency level. These strategies are expected to be used by all teachers within lessons, assignments, and assessments to support MLs and all learners. Best practices are strategies that educators can quickly implement within daily instruction, activities, and classroom assessments.

Description

A check for understanding (CFU) is any method used to inform the teacher about the student's current level of knowledge and understanding. Checking often for understanding is continually verifying that students are learning from instruction during the instruction.

Examples:
Signal It:  Ask students to display a designated hand signal to indicate their degree of confidence in their understanding of a concept, principle, or process. 

• Thumbs up: I understand _____ and can explain it in my own words.
• Wave hand: I’m not completely sure about _____ and doubt I could explain it.
• Thumbs down: I don’t yet understand _____ and cannot explain it.

Ask open-ended questions: Instead of "do you understand" ask questions that lead to definitive answers, based on what you’re studying.
Who else doesn’t understand? When you’ve identified a student that doesn’t understand a particular point, ask if anyone else is confused by the same thing so that other students realize they are not alone. This encourages even more students to speak up.

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	Teacher	Student
	The teacher explicitly plans to do the following: pause to check in with students and their learning use multiple CFUs within a lesson	The student responds to the teacher's prompts.

	Teacher	Student
	The teacher says, "Let's check in with your learning. Use our 'Thumbs Up, Hand Wave, or Thumbs Down' signal."	The student responds to hand signal. "I don't quite understand how to complete this problem."

Recommended Domain(s)	Recommended Level(s)
Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing	All levels