Make Time for Learning
When Checking Becomes the Lesson
After years of visiting schools and sitting in classrooms, I’ve noticed a quiet but growing problem: we are spending more and more time checking what pupils have learned, and less time actually helping them learn.
It’s understandable. Over the past two decades, the message that teachers should check for understanding has become deeply embedded - and rightly so. Retrieval practice, mini whiteboards, low-stakes quizzes, hinge questions, exit tickets: all of these can be powerful when used well. But too often, these tools take centre stage. Lessons become a sequence of checks, corrections, and re-checks, with little time left for the actual process of building new knowledge.
It’s as though assessment for learning has swallowed the lesson whole. Teachers are constantly gathering information - Do they know it? Can they recall it? Have they understood? - but in doing so, the time to teach something new quietly slips away. The result can be pupils who are excellent at responding to questions about what they once knew, but less confident when asked to apply or extend that knowledge in unfamiliar contexts.
The problem isn’t the techniques themselves but the balance and intent behind them. Checking for understanding should be a pit stop, not the whole race. A quick retrieval quiz at the start of a lesson can refresh prior knowledge and make space for new material. But when that check drifts into ten or fifteen minutes of going through every answer, the opportunity to build on that knowledge has already slipped away.
The same can happen mid-lesson. Formative assessment is meant to steer teaching in real time, not to replace it. Yet too often, teachers spend long stretches reviewing pupil work under a visualiser, correcting every misconception while the rest of the class sits silently watching. The instinct is right (to model, to clarify, to show) but the proportion is wrong. The teacher ends up doing all the cognitive work, and the pupils end up watching someone else learn.
Perhaps this is one of the lingering effects of the “AfL era,” when every lesson was expected to show progress and every moment had to provide visible evidence of it. In trying to prove learning, we’ve sometimes crowded out the space in which learning actually happens.
What’s missing in many of these lessons is time spent on what Zoe and I explored in Generative Learning in Action: activities that require pupils to do something with what they’ve learned. Explaining, summarising, mapping, comparing, applying - these are the actions that turn short-term recall into long-term understanding. Generative learning isn’t about testing what pupils know; it’s about helping them think with that knowledge so that it becomes part of how they see the world. When lessons are dominated by checking, we skip the vital stage where pupils use knowledge actively to make meaning.
The most effective teachers strike a different balance. They check quickly, respond precisely, and move on. Their lessons have rhythm and purpose: retrieve, connect, explain, apply, reflect. The checking serves the learning, not the other way round. Pupils spend more time thinking about geography - or literature, or maths - and less time thinking about whether they’ve got it right yet.
We need to reclaim classroom time as time for learning. That means treating assessment as a compass, not a destination. Check - yes. But then teach, explain, model, and give pupils time to practise. Because learning isn’t found in the moment of checking; it’s built in what happened before and what happens next.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, you can read more of my reflections on teaching, curriculum, and school improvement on Substack — or connect with me on LinkedIn where I share regular updates on my work with schools.