Effective teachers monitor their students' learning in the classroom by asking them questions, responding to their questions, and monitoring their body language and facial expressions. Sometimes turning a student's question around back to the student is quite illuminating. For example, a student asks the teacher to explain why the crime rate dropped in a particular year. The teacher might say, “Why do you think the rate dropped?” In their attempt to respond, effective teachers listen for what the student has learned to that point. However, sometimes this backfires and the student says, “I don't know. That's why I'm asking you.”
Effective teachers get feedback from their students about their teaching techniques and use this feedback to adjust to the needs of the students. One way of getting this feedback is conducting a short informal, anonymous survey asking about particular techniques. For example, ask “Do the lectures help you to learn?” or, “What can I do to help you learn?”
Assessment tools are an effective teaching tool for assessing learners. Classroom exercises, including brainstorming, are another tool. Brainstorming exercises require students to discuss or solve an open-ended question, such as, “How effective is the death penalty?” Students discuss this question in small groups and share the group's ideas with the rest of the class at the end of the exercise. Teachers listen in on the group discussions to see how much the students have learned about the topic.
A concept map exercise requires students to create a pattern from a list of terms. For example, students might be given the terms "prison," "police," "parole," "trial" and "offender." The map the students come up with is of the criminal justice system. The exercise does not need to have one right answer but can serve instead to promote creative discussion of the topic.
Decision-making exercises require students to develop a plan of action for a particular problem. For example, “Imagine you are the committee charged with making recommendations for changes to the three strikes laws. Develop a plan of action for coming up with those recommendations.” The students work on this exercise in groups to develop a plan based on what they have learned. Based on the result, teachers are then able to assess their level of learning.