Do a simple online search for the word “teacher” and you will soon come across lots of photos of teachers standing at the front of a classroom with children waving their hands in the air ready to answer a question. But is this actually what constitutes good teaching? Or is it an age-old practice that should be consigned to history?
But what is the problem with students putting their hands up to answer a question, I hear you ask? That is how we were all taught as children when we were in school wasn’t it?
Well, the underlying problem is that this approach of raising a hand and offering to “participate” in answering the questions that a teacher poses equally means that students can do the exact opposite – keep their hand down so they don’t have to participate.
This creates an “opt-in” culture where teachers are happy to regularly and habitually take answers from enthusiastic students who want to participate, but others get away with opting out. This creates two main issues within the classroom:
Opting out of having to think: If teachers usually only go to students who have their hands up, then by default if you keep your hand down it means that you are not going to be picked to answer a question. In turn, this means that you do not even need to think about the answer, because the teacher will be selecting someone else to answer it. This means that as a passive student, you can just sit there and let everyone else do the work, occasionally copying down the right answers into your book when instructed (which requires no thought or brain power at all).
Poor checking for understanding: If we only ever take answers from the enthusiastic students who want to contribute (presumably because they are confident that they have a good and accurate answer), then we are at risk of making dangerous inferences about what the whole class knows, when in fact we are only sampling a small cross-section of students – the ones who already think know the answer. This can lead to an assumption that I see so many teachers make – “Great, we’ve got this. Let’s move on.” In fact, one enthusiastic, confident, and knowledgeable student has got it, and we’ve assumed this must be the case for everyone else.
Making students think deeply
Thinking about the first point (opting out of having to think) – long-term learning is all about strengthening our memory of something so that we can recall it at a later date (whether that is for an exam, or whether it is to use that knowledge in our life to either solve an issue or connect the knowledge to something else).
It brings to mind two great quotes on memory from Professor Daniel Willingham:
- “Memory is the residue of thought.”
- “We remember what we think about.”
Therefore, our job as teachers is to make our students think regularly and deeply in our classrooms. Without this happening, students can very quickly slip into what we call “mental truancy” – a state of being where you are physically present but mentally absent.
In this state of mental truancy, students can appear on the surface to be compliant (they are not causing any disturbance or disruption to the students around them), but are they actually engaged in the lesson with their brains having to think and work hard?
In order to stop this from happening, we need to change our mindset and motives for why we ask a question from wanting an answer from someone to wanting to make everyone in the room think.
If we can rewire our brain into asking questions to make everyone think, rather than just wanting an answer from one student, then we can completely transform the level of deep thinking that our students have to do every hour of every day.
A great way to do this is to use the popular cold call questioning strategy to take your questioning to the next level. Cold calling involves the teacher taking control of selecting students to answer questions, rather than waiting for volunteers or calling on those who have their hands raised.
By either randomly or strategically selecting students to answer questions, teachers can make sure that every student is having to think deeply and take a regular and active part in class.
When students are strategically or randomly selected to answer questions by their teacher, they are almost forced to think and be ready to respond at all times.
This helps to increase their level of engagement in the classroom because they know that they could be asked to answer a question at any given moment – meaning they have to stay mentally focused, constantly thinking by staying up-to-speed with the lesson.
Four steps for cold calling
So how do you get started with cold calling? Here is a simple four-step process.
First, establish a “hands down” approach to questioning in your classroom. The key here is that you are going to choose who answers the questions and you are not going to let students decide if they want to raise their hands to participate. This might take time to embed in your classroom, especially if your students are not used to it and they have been habitually used to being able to raise their hands to answer one of your questions.
Second, once you have asked a question, let it simmer in the air for a few seconds. This is what is referred to as “wait time” or “thinking time”. Students need a few seconds to think about the answer and it also signifies to everyone that they all have to be thinking about the answer right now. This is their cue to think.
Third, now select a student to answer the question. There are two good ways to do this. First, use a random name generator. These tools can be found online and can pick a student name at random. Students quite like this method because it adds a bit of excitement to the process. However, it is completely random.
The second method is to strategically and intentionally select a specific student. This is obviously far from random and means you can select a student for a number of different reasons, e.g. they are a high ability student, they are a disadvantaged student, or they may have been off task and you are using the question to subconsciously tell them that you know they weren’t listening. There are so many reasons why you would choose a certain student to answer (or start us off with part of the answer) to a specific question.
Fourth, be ready with a response if a student says, “I don’t know”. When a student tells you that they don’t know, this could mean any one of the following things: I don’t actually know, I don’t have the confidence to say my answer in front of the class, or I don’t want to think. As the teacher (and with your deep understanding of each individual student) you need to be able to process this response very quickly and choose what to do next. Do you provide them with some help or a clue? Do you move to another student and tell the first student you will be coming back to them? Or do you tell the student that you are moving to someone else but you will be coming to them for the next question? Either way, you can not just accept “I don’t know” and let a student opt-out of the whole process. Having a mental script of “go-to” responses for the “I don’t know” answer reduces your cognitive load at that point, because you have a set of automated responses ready to use, leaving your brian more space to think about what to do next.
Final thought
So it is time to take back control of who answers the questions in your classroom. By taking time to practise and commit to the cold calling strategy you can begin to make questioning one of your teaching super powers, ensuring that all students have to think every time you pose a question.
- Jon Tait is deputy CEO of the Areté Learning Trust in North Yorkshire. Find him @TeamTait or via www.edutait.com