4 Top Tips on Hinge Questions

4 Top Tips on Hinge Questions

I studied hinge questions for my masters dissertation project. Most of my project was based on Dylan Wiliams work on hinge questions. A hinge question is asked before half way through a lesson, every student answers and the teacher responds within 30 seconds. As the name suggests, the response to the question determines the direction of the lesson, reteach, practice or move on. You can use them at several stages to determine understanding and you can layer them to separate students into various levels of understanding.

Here are my 4 top tips for an effective hinge question:

1.      Use multiple choice

You need to gather answers and process them quickly. The best way is to offer multiple choice. It also means that you can give students options with common misconceptions, which leads me on to…

2.      Plan carefully

Hinge questions shouldn’t just be flung into a lesson unplanned. You need to design them carefully to check student understanding. Think about what pitfalls students might fall into and incorporate that into your question. You need to see and process every students answer, mini whiteboards would be good if you want to see their working (remembering that responding quickly is important, so you might not want all their working). Multiple choice can be collected quickly using voting pads, raising hands, showing coloured cards (I get mine to use their planners as they have red, orange, green, purple and white pages meaning I can have up to five multiple choice answers).

3.      Timing

Ask at the start of the lesson to determine what they already know, ask after teaching to see how much they have understood, ask at the end of the lesson to see if you can move on next lesson. When you ask your question, it must tell you something about where the students are and how you can get them to where you want them to be. The timing will depend on the purpose, and although initially research suggested before half way through the lesson, if your purpose is to determine prior learning why not ask before any teaching? Or if to summarise learning, why not at the end of the lesson? It goes back to tip #2.

4.      Have options to follow up the hinge question

So, my students understand. Do I waste time practicing the skills or do I move on to some problem solving? They don’t understand at all, do I reteach it or expect them to be able to practice? Or what if some get it, some sort of understand and some of them are totally stuck? You need to know how you are going to move forward with the lesson and prepare for every possible outcome. One thing I did was prepare a single resource based on every outcome, with a modelled solution followed by structured questions for those who are still struggling at the top of the worksheet, unstructured questions with scrambled answers at the side for those still a bit unsure, and problem-solving questions and rich open-ended tasks or investigations for those who have a good understanding of the topic. This meant students could move down the sheet as their confidence grew. You can also get a small group or individuals to work with you at the front if they are still really struggling.

Strategies to Develop a Growth Mindset

Strategies to Develop a Growth Mindset

Our school has had a strong focus on mindset for a while. We praise effort over achievement and champion the idea that those students who work hard will ultimately be more successful. Ana Castillo loaned me Carol Dweck’s Mindset book when I started at school, and I immediately identified the biggest barrier to learning in my classroom was students having a fixed mindset in Maths. I then started reading Jo Boaler’s work and based my CPD project on what I read, trying to develop a growth mindset in my classroom.

Here are 5 things I did:

1.      Focused on Effort

This is something school does well anyway, but when marking books I only ever made comments about effort rather than work (other than suggestions for improvements obviously). I would also shower the students showing excellent or improved effort with rewards, merits, postcards and phone calls home. I had a star of the fortnight too, where I would take picture of someone’s classwork who had put excellent effort into a lesson so other students could see what excellent effort looks like.

2.      Championed Mistakes

Mistakes in Maths are inevitable and probably what students are most frightened of. I created a culture that mistakes are brilliant if we learn from them. I would make mistakes myself to show it was human, I would give wrong answers and get students to analyse what was wrong and what the corrections should be, I would pick out students work who had made a mistake and show it under the visualiser to discuss with the class (then thank them for letting us all learn by sharing their work and give them a merit). I even started a display of “Our Favourite Mistakes Learning Opportunities”. A starter task I would use was “favourite no” where the students anonymously attempted a question, I’d sort them into “correct” and “wrong” piles, then look at some of the wrong answers under the visualiser comment on what was good but then highlight where students went wrong. This was great to see what students knew too.

3.      Taught them about Growth Mindset

I told them about how effort was fundamental to making progress. I discussed students I had taught previously who had been successful because of their effort (obviously not mentioning names). I did assemblies with examples of successful people, including staff, who had overcome difficulties to become successful at something. I used a lot of the information from Carol Dweck and Jo Boaler’s books to give reasoning behind some of the things we were doing. Unsurprisingly, if you explain the benefits students are more likely to get on board (although this was something I wasn’t very good at doing beforehand).

4.      Changed my Language

Again, linking back to #1 being careful to praise effort over attainment, so praising a student for working hard or improving rather than praising the one who always gets full marks without really trying. Moving away from talking about work being hard or easy, not labelling students or grouping them by ability. It was important to speak positively and challenge students showing a fixed mindset, when students said “I can’t do it” or “I don’t get it” remind them that effort is vital to be successful, I then would always say “ask me a question” and leave them to think. Then they would sit and carfefully think what the problem was and ask a specific question to move their understanding forward, having a ‘lightbulb moment’.

5.      Students Chose Mindset Posters

I selected a couple of different mindset posters and showed them all to the students, asked them which their favourites were, printed them and stuck on the wall to refer to them in lessons. As they chose them, it was powerful when a student said they couldn’t do something to point at the poster.