Hinge Question:
-A question that decides whether the students have understanding of the topic before you move on
-A question to assess students’ understanding of the learning intention, that allows a teacher to make a judgment about where to go next with the class.
-A planned question intended to direct/inform teaching by exploring misconceptions and measuring whole-class understanding
-Helps teacher gather evidence about student performance to decide what to do next
(Helpful definitions from the workshop participants' exit slips)
I recently had the opportunity to run a PD for staff on what hinge questions are, and how to use them in the classroom. A pre-reading/listening was set, which was Dylan Wiliam's interview on ACER's Teacher Podcast (transcript also available), and the goal was to give teachers a good understanding of what hinge questions are, their role, and their value.
Teachers were split into groups and given the following task.
Here's one group's response, how they arranged the sound bites (photo taken before they'd finished)
I then shared how I'd organised the sound bites into a coherent (hopefully) slab of text.
The session then moved onto a hinge question about hinge questions, which promoted much discussion.
Unfortunately we ran out of time to get into creating hinge qs for ourselves (we only had 45 mins), so will have to work on that next time.
Here's the slide I'd prepared for that activity.
And then there was the exit slip that was used.
Please feel free to use this PD as is, or modify and use. A folder containing all resources required to run this PD can be found here (it also includes presenter notes within the powerpoint slide comment section, and feedback from participants that I'll use to modify the workshop if I ever use it again). Enjoy : )