Hot and cold over Cold Calling

 I've let some of the heat go out of the Cold Calling debate on twitter before writing this. What I want to say about it is too much and slightly too complex for a tweet. And I'll try to be true to the Nice Man ideals on here and do it without the eye rolling  and side-taking you might fall into on twitter.

I don't like the name. Cold Calling. Sounds like a poem by T.S. Eliot. I don't think anyone likes the name. I don't mind the concept. But it worries me that it's such a Big Thing. I can't imagine teaching a lesson where you are only interested to hear from the pupils who have their hands up. Rather than rolling my eyes, I am shaking my head at that idea. But there are circumstances where exactly that scenario plays out. I will come on to that.

Then there's hands up. Again, I am looking askance at the idea that you can't have pupils putting their hands up and then go ahead and ask one of the pupils whose hand isn't up. Of course you can do that.

So how do I try to build participation and engagement in my classroom?

Hands up:

• Ask the question to the whole class and expect everyone to think about it and be ready to answer.
• If I ask a question or ask for participation, pupils put their hands up. I might narrate what I am doing: You know I'm going to ask you sometime this lesson, so put your hands up now so you don't end up at the end with a question you don't want to answer.
  
• I might, or might not ask one of the pupils whose hand is up. I will narrate what I am doing: If your hand is up, I have noticed, but I might ask someone else.
• I might give more time for pupils to put their hand up: I'm starting to wonder about the people whose hands aren't up. I need to find out what they are thinking. And then I will decide who I want to ask. Hand up, or no hand up. I decide.
  
• If there's a series of questions on the board, I won't necessarily go through them in order. I'll let pupils pick which one they want to answer.
• I keep a list in my head of which pupils haven't participated yet. And I let pupils know that I am doing this. And just because someone has answered, doesn't mean I won't come back to them.

Does this mean that I am asking 30 questions per lesson or having 30 interactions per lesson. Quite possibly yes. I do a lot of Question and Answer, building model answers or asking for participation in speaking French. There are ways of involving more than one pupil in a question. If there are pupils who have their hands up but you ask someone else, you can check that answer with the other pupils before accepting it. Is that what you were going to say? Was there something you want to add to that answer?

With my Year 7 class recently, I did my reminder spiel about how I'd be asking everyone at some point. And one of my most potentially reluctant pupils put their hand up and said, "I don't know the answer but I do know that..." and reeled off three things that all related to the question and made the next questions to the class much more focused and fruitful. That's what I'm trying to achieve. Not catching pupils out!

And how you respond to pupils' answers is also vital to a climate of engagement and participation. If a pupil doesn't want to say a word because they are worried they would say it wrong: "It's literally my job to find out what you're struggling with and teach you." Being genuinely interested in what pupils think. If someone does get something wrong, then thank them for helping tackle it. And when later in the lesson, people get it right, go back and thank them for making sure we all paid attention to it. Most importantly, being prepared to deal with what their (wrong/partial/tangential/unexpected) answers throw up.

This week I asked "How do you say I would like?" and the pupil took an unexpectedly long time to reply and said, "Is it je veux aimer?" Which was the perfect answer to get at several key features of je voudrais. The different way English and French deal with the conditional tense, and the fact that French uses vouloir not aimer.

And this brings me on to where the hands up/cold calling dilemma does come into play. In my normal class teaching I am actively seeking out where there is misunderstanding or partial understanding. I am leading the class in collective thinking, correcting errors, making links and exploring the boundaries of their knowledge. What happens to change that?

Two things change that situation completely. One is if it's not my class. The other is if the lesson is being observed. 

If it's a class I have borrowed, because I'm covering for an absent colleague for example, my narrative of knowing each pupil and where they are with their learning, and me being responsible for their progress, and having the right atmosphere of trust and engagement, doesn't apply. I might just gratefully take contributions from the pupils with their hands up, just to keep things rolling and get to the end of the lesson.

If I am being observed. Do I really want to be probing and seeking out misconceptions and things that could derail or divert the lesson? As a teacher of some 25,000 hours' experience, who really doesn't care what an observer thinks, then I might. As a less experienced teacher, being judged by the observer, then I might not. I might naturally do everything to keep the lesson precisely on the rails by gratefully accepting the participation of pupils who volunteer the right answers.

So a trainee teacher or a new teacher may well find themselves with a class that isn't yet really "theirs", and also being observed. The double whammy! In these circumstances, the hands up v cold calling debate does kick in. With an unfamiliar class, picking pupils at random using lollypop sticks with names on is a way to take the blame for picking on a pupil away from the teacher. It was random, it was fair and it could even be fun. And it's the start of that conversation about, "I'm not testing you to try to catch you out. I am genuinely interested in your answer."

The French teacher's secret weapon is to pick the pupil using Am stram gram... Pupils love it and surreptitiously try to memorise it and join in. And of course if you get picked by am stram gram, you have to contribute because them's the rules.

Also helped by the fact that my friend Charley Guigon on my year abroad (pre Google) had a collection of these rhymes from around the world which he passed on to me!

That's why I couldn't fit it all in a tweet. I don't like the name cold calling. I don't teach in a way that's about right/wrong answers and catching pupils out. I want all pupils to know that I will value their participation. I expect their participation, but give them some opportunity to do so on their own terms. They can put their hands up, but if they don't, then they know I'll be interested to know why not. They can pick which question to answer or answer a slightly different question, or answer it with a question, or give a partial answer or even a wrong answer. And we'll take it on from there. And they know that whatever happens, I'm keeping track and I know where to go next. And when it works, it's fantastic with the class buzzing to take part confidently.

And sometimes it doesn't work. And I'll tell them that I seem to have pitched it wrong today and I'll have a think and pick it up again next time.

So that's the debate I think we should be having. How to create a class with participation and engagement, with a teacher who monitors and adapts. That's the rich and fruitful complex area I'd like to be exploring. Not picking sides!

What I do want to ask the experts and the gurus, is what to do when it's just not working. When it's a rainy Thursday afternoon after PE. Or the pupils are too hot. Or I'm too tired to think straight. Or it's that class that just hates me and French and the universe today. When you've tried everything. How do you get them to glimpse how great lessons could be if they took some risks, had a go, listened carefully and thought about things? Starting from admitting that sometimes things are just not working for me!

Here's a post on what happened when a Year 9 Spanish lesson just wasn't working. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-lost-art-of-teaching-with-whiteboard.html

Here's a Year 8 French lesson that just didn't work. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2022/05/it-turned-out-alright-in-end.html

And I had one with Year 10 Spanish last week where we worked on something for 3 lessons and what I wanted to achieve by the third one just didn't happen. I'll write that one up too sometime when I've decided what to do about it.

It's not the neat either/or picking sides that matters. It's the messy ground in the middle where relationships, experience, adaptation, quick thinking, genuine interest in pupils, and clear vision of where learning is probably going happens. Let's all get stuck into that!