A practical staff session on assessment and questioning in the lesson: why a class can nod along and then fail the test, and how to check every pupil’s understanding while there’s still time to change the lesson. The message: a check is worth asking only if every pupil answers and you’ll do something different because of what you see. Colleagues leave with five moves for a check that changes the lesson, a rehearsed hinge-question moment (including what to do with each answer), and one change to try with one class.

It runs for 90 minutes, with a 60-minute route in the leader guide and a 15-minute follow-up meeting two to four weeks later. Inside:

• a private before-and-after self-rating and a timed think-pair-share
• a myths poll grounded in the DfE’s guidance
• what the DfE’s ITT and Early Career Framework (Standards 4 and 6), Ofsted’s 2026 toolkit and the DfE’s Commission on Assessment Without Levels say about checking understanding and recording it, shown as extracts from the documents
• a lesson to fix, four question types side by side, and a card sort: shows you every pupil, depends how it’s done, or shows you little?
• four branching cases (a class who all said they understood, a cold call that goes wrong, a spreadsheet nobody opens, and a pupil with dyspraxia who can’t finish his mini-whiteboard in time), each showing what is likely to happen next and the guidance behind it
• two discussion cases: ‘progress in twenty minutes’ on an observation form, and a pile of unread exit tickets
• a timed carousel, a rehearsed hinge question with an observer sheet, an ordering task, a four-question quiz and a one-page action plan

Three short films are embedded from YouTube: one from the Education Endowment Foundation on embedding formative assessment, one from InnerDrive with Doug Lemov on cold calling that pupils can succeed at, and one from Tips for Teachers with Craig Barton on mini-whiteboard routines. Each has a watch-along task, a backup link and its posting date.

What’s included:

• a 68-slide PowerPoint with clickable agenda, branching cases, click-to-reveal answers, on-screen timers and an editable slide for your school’s details
• a 12-page leader guide (PDF and Word) with a planning checklist, timings, case and quiz answers, printable scenario and station cards, and sources
• a 10-page participant workbook (fillable PDF and Word)

Please plan it with whoever leads assessment or teaching and learning, and check your assessment policy and observation forms before you run cases 3 and 5. It is written for schools in England. Crown copyright extracts are reproduced under the Open Government Licence; EEF findings are quoted briefly with the source given. It is not endorsed by the DfE, Ofsted, the EEF, InnerDrive or Tips for Teachers, and it is not accredited. All cases are fictional.

Works best in PowerPoint Slide Show, with an internet connection for the films.