I say that to students about 3-4 times a week, after a student has acted surprised that I want to see what they're doing. But I didn't always say it. I used to be the teacher that lectured all week, gave a quiz once a unit, had a review day for a test, and then gave a traditional test The only time I ever looked at my students' learning was on the quizzes and the tests.
I think we all know by now that doing that is just not enough. It's not enough for a teacher to see where student learning is at during the course of instruction, and it's not often enough to help students catch broken learning so it can be fixed before moving on.
So I slowly over the years started planning learning activities with built-in "nosiness checks" for myself. You can see an example of these on my class websites; an example from my Environmental Science site is below.
I use a lot of technology, but, if you read the steps carefully, you'll see that I think one of the best ways to be nosy about student learning is to have students grab an individual whiteboard and a marker and have them literally show me the learning while having a conversation about it at the same time. Here are the benefits of doing this:1) Having conversations with students helps you get to know them as learners. You get an immediate sense of which students are struggling and need extra support and which students can zoom ahead, needing challenge activities.
2) You get to know your students as people. Since I started doing this, I have really gotten to know who my students are and how they think.
3) You can get students to fix their knowledge at the moment you realize it's broken because you can give immediate and actionable verbal feedback. This isn't always popular with students ("You mean I have to go do it AGAIN?" is a popular lament that I hear), but they like it in the long run when they are successful on summative assessments.
4) It helps foster a growth mindset. When I hear that aforementioned lament, I take that as an opportunity to remind my students that learning is a journey, not an all-or-nothing game - in order to get better, mistakes must be made, and fixes must be done.
Does doing school this way take longer? You betcha. Does being nosy like this give you a better sense of your students' learning? Absolutely. But, most importantly, I think it helps students see what real learning is - not a game of accuracy, but a process of growth.
