teachers happy 2022. are you having a good year no i'm sorry to hear that i've got something really really important to teach you this is a thing that will change your overall approach to your teaching and your lessons it's a super small tip but it is a really big game changer when you implement it effectively let's go and take a look at it whether you're teaching languages other subjects or really anything at all there is one specific question that you should never ask and this question gets asked all of the time in hundreds of thousands of classrooms across the world each day it's probably a question that you've asked your students yourself you may have even asked it today this question this question that you should never ask is do you understand it's hard just to say it i feel polluted i feel dirty in this video we are going to investigate why asking this question is so wrong and all of the different ways that we can improve it and make it right do you want to know what's wrong with asking do you understand watch the whole video [Music] do you understand it seems like such a logical thing to ask it's almost second nature really you teach a student a process or a concept the teaching ends and you follow it up with do you understand do you understand what you've learned and the student is probably going to say yes and that's where the lesson ends but that's also where the problem begins because does that question really show if the student has understood anything the student could be saying yes because they think they understand but they're wrong or they could be saying yes because they want you to leave them alone so you can't ask do you understand because it doesn't check anything so what are you supposed to do instead what you have to do what you should do is ccq and ccq stand for concept check questions what these are are a series of questions that will truly bring out the meaning of the word let's move over to the board and we'll see how these work let's take a look at how these ccqs work imagine i've taught the word scary now i could ask my students do you understand what scary means but the problem with that is they're just going to say yes and it doesn't really show me anything so instead i have to ask a whole bunch of ccqs or at least three for cc queuing there's a lot of ccqs that you can ask one of the easiest ones to start off with is a yes or no question so i can throw up a picture of puppies and i can ask my students are these scary and of course their answer should be no i can then throw up something that is scary and i can say is this scary and they'll say yes and that alone shows me at least some basic comprehension of what the word is there's a whole bunch of other ccqs that i can ask i can get the synonym what's another word for scary i can get the antonym what's the opposite of scary i can have them use scary in a sentence i can have them point to something that's scary i can have them draw something that's that's scary i can have them mime it out how they feel if they see something that's scary other things that i can do is i can just simply ask them what does scary mean give me the definition of it i can ask them a whole bunch of different contextual questions my who what why when how's you know how do you feel when you see something scary what do you do if you see something scary where is the scary part of your city what time of day is it kind of scary at different words will use different ccqs so try to think of the best questions to ask to really pull out that specific meaning so now i know because if the student answers the questions right it means that they've really understood what i've taught them if they answer them wrong it means that the teaching broke down somewhere and i'm gonna have to teach it again ccqs are basically saying show me that you understand so use these questions in your actual teaching use them in all of your classes use them when you teach anything even if it's not language related ccqs are a valid way of truly checking comprehension and you should get into the habit of using them whenever you can and you should get that terrible question out of your mind and never ask it again never ever ever ask do you understand again thanks so much for your time as always thanks for watching leave your comment in the comment section and stay tuned for the next video [Music]