Reading the ResponseChoosing which next step to give

Lundy Loop
Staff card

Classify the cause, not the child.
Your job on this card: decide what a pupil's response actually means, so the next step you give follows from it. Nothing on this card is recorded, ticked, coded or collected.

What this card is not. It is not about closing the loop, and it makes no claim about closure — closure is unchanged and is stated in one place only, the calibration game and the subject guides. It is not a print addition: it changes no lesson file and no pupil sheet. It adds no second mark beside the one the pupil already makes.

Why this exists

An incorrect response is not lack of effort. An incomplete one is not low understanding. Those two misreadings are the most common way a next step goes wrong in this cohort — and both of them look like a reasonable judgement at the time. The five branches exist so the read is made deliberately rather than by instinct.

The five branches

Secure Transfer to an unfamiliar example · raise precision · reduce the prompt so the pupil works more independently. The risk here is repetition — a pupil who has it being asked to show it again.

Mixed pattern Contrast two examples · use peer reasoning · then recheck every pupil. A mixed class pattern hides individuals; the recheck is the part that gets skipped.

Shared misconception Stop · counterexample or re-model · new hinge question. A repeated identical error is a taught gap, not inattention. Do not proceed and hope.

Access barrier Keep the learning goal exactly where it is · change modality, environment or presentation. The goal never drops to meet the barrier. Scribing and other access arrangements are access, not lesser authorship — read the thinking, not the handwriting.

Method or data problem Repair the procedure or the quality of the evidence · then repeat. The thinking may be sound where the method is not. A wrong prediction honestly tested and revised is strong learning, never a failure state.

Then make it visible — say this at arrival

“Last lesson your evidence showed ______. Today we are starting with ______.”

Say it aloud, in your own words, at the start of the next lesson. This is the whole of it: the pupil hears that their response changed what happens today, which is what Influence actually means. It is something you say, not a form. There is no box, nothing to fill in, nothing to keep, and no version of it that anyone collects. Its entire value is that it costs nothing and leaves no artefact.

How this sits with what already exists

It attaches to the next step you already give — conceptually, never physically. The branch helps you choose which next step. It does not add a line, a box or a second next step to any sheet.
One next step per pupil per lesson. If reading this card ever produces a second one, that is the error it is meant to prevent.
The support record is a separate, later thing. The adult-side prompt record records how much help it took; this card is about what the response meant. That design is proposed and unbuilt, gated on its own triggers — read the two together when it lands, and do not anticipate it here.
Nothing is written down. No branch code, no tally, no register, no percentage, no collection. The branch is expressed as the next step you give and nowhere else.

Safeguarding. If a pupil discloses something that worries you, it leaves this workflow entirely and goes to the DSL by the school's safeguarding route. It never enters a caption, a handoff note, an evidence folder or a conversation about next steps.