CELTA - The Ultimate Guide to Instruction Checking Questions (or ICQs)

Summary

Clear instructions are a cornerstone of effective teaching, especially in online environments where assessing student comprehension can be challenging. In this video, Jo Gakonga from ELTTraining.com delves into ICQs, or Instruction Checking Questions, which help ensure students understand tasks. While asking students directly if they understand might not yield reliable affirmation, using ICQs provides more concrete feedback on their comprehension. However, care must be taken to avoid overusing ICQs, which can seem patronizing and confusing. Instead, focus on clarifying specific task elements or consider demonstrating with stronger students to enhance understanding across the board. A balance of ICQs and demonstrations can lead to more effective instruction delivery, ensuring students are well-prepared for tasks in both face-to-face and online learning settings.

Highlights

• Instructions must be clear and concise for effective teaching. 🎯
• Online environments require robust methods to check student comprehension. 💻
• Simply asking students if they understand might not be reliable. 🤷
• ICQs offer a method to verify students' understanding through specific answers. ✔️
• Overdoing ICQs can come off as patronizing or confuse learners. 😵
• Focus ICQs on difficult parts of a task for clarity. 🔍
• Demonstrations with strong students can illustrate complex tasks effectively. 🎓
• Prepare students thoroughly before they work in breakout rooms. 📚
• Balance ICQs with demonstrations for better instruction success. 🎢

Key Takeaways

• Clear instructions are crucial for effective teaching, especially online. 🌐
• ICQs help check students' understanding of tasks in a concrete way. 🤔
• Avoid overusing ICQs as it can confuse or patronize students. ⚠️
• Clarify tricky task elements rather than ask too many questions. 🧩
• Demonstrations can effectively prepare students for complex tasks. 🎭
• Using both ICQs and demos ensures comprehensive instruction delivery. 🏆

Overview

Providing clear instructions is fundamental in teaching, with added importance in online settings. Teachers often grapple with how to ensure students understand the tasks at hand. Jo Gakonga from ELTTraining.com discusses ICQs or Instruction Checking Questions, a vital tool for confirming students' understanding of instructions.

However, posing straightforward 'Do you understand?' questions might not work since students could affirm understanding for various reasons, including embarrassment or false belief. Jo emphasizes the usefulness of ICQs, which use specific questions to gauge true comprehension. Yet, she advises caution against excessive ICQs as they risk being patronizing or overwhelming students.

A mix of ICQs and task demonstrations strikes a balance. Demonstrating tasks with stronger students before transitioning others to independent work, especially in online breakout rooms, is recommended. This approach, although it might seem time-consuming initially, ensures students are well-equipped to tackle exercises, making it time well spent in the long run.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to ICQs The chapter introduces the concept of instruction checking questions (ICQs) which are important for assessing student understanding, particularly in an online teaching context. It emphasizes the necessity of clear instructions and the methods to ensure students comprehend what is expected of them. The chapter is presented by Joacona from ELTTraining.com.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Importance of Clear Instructions Instructions play a key role in understanding tasks.
• 01:00 - 02:00: Potential Problems with Simple Confirmation In the chapter titled 'Potential Problems with Simple Confirmation,' the discussion revolves around the reliability of simple yes/no confirmations in a learning environment. The text outlines three potential reasons a learner might affirm their understanding: genuine comprehension, embarrassment leading to feigned understanding, or a mistaken belief that they understand when they do not. The latter two scenarios highlight the limitations of relying solely on verbal confirmations without considering non-verbal cues, particularly as these cues may not be visible in certain teaching contexts, such as remote learning.
• 02:00 - 02:30: Challenges in Online Teaching The chapter 'Challenges in Online Teaching' addresses the difficulties instructors face when facilitating learning in an online format compared to a traditional classroom setting. One of the primary challenges highlighted is the inability to easily monitor and assess student engagement and understanding when students are placed in virtual breakout rooms. This limitation necessitates delivering clear instructions before beginning tasks to prevent misunderstandings. To tackle these issues, one suggested strategy is ensuring students can articulate their task objectives, which helps confirm they have fully understood the instructions.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Techniques for Effective ICQs The chapter emphasizes the importance of using Instruction Checking Questions (ICQs) to ensure learners understand instructions, especially at lower proficiency levels. It warns that asking learners to explain their understanding may be linguistically challenging and less effective, suggesting instead the use of short questions that require simple answers to confirm comprehension.
• 03:30 - 04:30: Avoiding Overuse of ICQs The chapter 'Avoiding Overuse of ICQs' focuses on a common issue observed among novice teachers, which is the tendency to excessively use Instruction Checking Questions (ICQs). The transcript highlights the observation that while ICQs can be beneficial, extreme reliance on them can be counterproductive. An illustrative scenario is presented depicting how an instructor might overwhelm students with numerous questions about a simple text assignment, such as verifying whether students should read or listen, read individually, and how many questions they need to answer. This reflects the core message that clarity in instruction is essential, but overemphasizing checking understanding with too many questions can hinder effective teaching.
• 04:30 - 05:30: Effective Demonstrations The chapter titled 'Effective Demonstrations' discusses the importance of avoiding patronizing comments when teaching or demonstrating concepts. It suggests that such remarks might confuse learners instead of helping them understand. The chapter advises focusing on the difficult aspects of a task and asking relevant questions. It uses the example of teaching functional exponents to illustrate how to engage students in practice effectively.
• 05:30 - 06:30: Advantages of Demonstrations This chapter discusses the advantages of demonstrations in language practice scenarios. It highlights the importance of encouraging learners not to rely solely on initial examples provided but to explore multiple ways of using the language. The goal is to ensure learners don't complete tasks too quickly or superficially but engage more deeply by providing numerous suggestions for each problem or scenario.
• 06:30 - 07:30: Conclusion and Additional Resources The chapter provides a final overview and additional resources for learners. It suggests that demonstrating examples with stronger learners can make complex concepts clear quickly. The chapter emphasizes the importance of interactive sessions, offering practical advice such as using platforms like LinkedIn to search for jobs.

CELTA - The Ultimate Guide to Instruction Checking Questions (or ICQs) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 giving clear instructions is a fundamental part of teaching they they have to know what you want them to do and arguably this is even more important online but how do you know if they know what to do I'm joa cona from elttraining tocom and in this video I'm going to be looking at what are called IQs or instruction checking questions
• 00:30 - 01:00 going to look at what they are why they might be helpful and also some of the potential problems with them so instructions are important they need to be clear and concise and graded in a language the Learners can understand but let's assume that you've done that what's the next state how do you know that they have understood well you could ask them this or this but these aren't very helpful
• 01:00 - 01:30 questions because they're likely to say yeah and if they say yes there are three possible reasons why they might say that the first is because they genuinely have understood hooray the second is because they're just too embarrassed to say they don't and the third and perhaps more problematic is that they think they've understood but actually they haven't because you won't see that in their body language so this is a problem potentially in any class but face to
• 01:30 - 02:00 face around the class you can see which groups or Learners are struggling and you can quickly address that in an online environment when they're all in breakout rooms it's not so easy to quickly see and so it's even more important that you ensure that they understand your instructions before you set them off on the task so what can you do well I think there are three possibilities the first one is to get them to tell you what they have to do
• 02:00 - 02:30 this can be quite helpful at higher levels but at lower levels you have to be a bit careful because perhaps them explaining to you is more difficult linguistically than actually what they've got to do they might understand but not be able to explain it to you the thing you can do to avoid that is to ask them questions which have short easy answers that show you that they've understood these are what are called instruction checking questions or icq
• 02:30 - 03:00 this can be a useful technique but I watch a lot of novice teachers learning how to teach and I often find that it's taken to an extreme okay you're going to read this text and answer these five questions are you going to read or listen are you going to read on your own are you going to answer the questions how many questions are you going to answer
• 03:00 - 03:30 this isn't helpful as you can see it potentially comes across as a bit patronizing and it has the potential to actually confuse Learners rather than clarify it for them so what's better consider what's Difficult about the task and just ask questions about that let's imagine that you're teaching functional exponents of advice and you want them to practice these
• 03:30 - 04:00 you give them this language you want them to practice it the chances are that they might only use that first example that you've got in the box and this will mean that they'll finish the task very quickly so you could ask them do I want you to use all of these pieces of language yes do I want you to just give one suggestion for each problem no how many suggestions many if the task is a
• 04:00 - 04:30 bit complex though I actually think it's much better to just give a demonstration going through an example with Learners will make it very clear very quickly choose one of your stronger Learners and first of all you take the part which includes the target language Maria tell me that you want a new job have you thought about looking online you could try LinkedIn as lots of
• 04:30 - 05:00 opportunities there now try with another stronger learner and this time you take the other part and show them how they could expand the conversation Pedro I have a terrible headache what can I do but I hate taking tablets they make me feel worse have you got any other ideas a bath I haven't got time for that I've got to go to to work
• 05:00 - 05:30 soon now that's a good idea you could get a couple of other Learners to do an example open pair work in front of the class you could include your weaker Learners too supported by you or one of the stronger Learners this all might seem a bit time consuming but it's better to spend a bit of time make sure that they're all on message and when they go to breakout rooms they can do the T askk especially at lower levels so
• 05:30 - 06:00 good luck with your instructions and your IC Qs and your demonstrations and if you'd like other classroom management videos then there are more on my site in the Selter toolkit thanks very much for watching bye-bye