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Cat Rushton

Beyond Hands Down Questioning – When can they put their hands up?

Updated: Apr 29, 2022

Questioning is an aspect of teaching that seems to attract significant consideration and development time, there are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, questioning takes up a considerable proportion of teacher-student interaction and can be used to help students learn and help the teacher gain information about what the students have learnt, making it an important aspect of teaching to get right. But questioning also gets stuck under the spotlight more frequently than other aspects of teaching due to its easily observable nature. This also makes its it a “good candidate” for whole school approaches. Here I am not arguing for or against the need for whole school approaches. In an ideal world, whole school approaches would grow organically from teams of professionals combining research and experience and then distilling it into commonly agreed routes of best practice. But the pragmatist in me suspects the pressures on schools and those working in them, makes this unlikely to happen as often, or as rapidly as we need it to for us to drive school improvements at the pace that is often necessary.


A whole school approach to questioning can appear, at first sight, a straightforward way to standardise and improve whole school questioning practices. There is a wealth of excellent advice about how to improve questioning and maximise its impact on individuals and whole groups of students. Hands-down questioning, often called cold calling is an example of a highly effective questioning strategy and undoubtedly its effective use has a positive impact on student learning. However, when rolled out at whole school level, threw up some unexpected obstacles and in fact needed a degree of nuance which we had to learn along the way…..


What is cold calling?


To briefly paraphrase the many (much more qualified) educationalists who have written about the process of cold calling in the classroom, cold calling is a process by which the teacher poses the question, gives appropriate wait time (dependent on both the students and the question) and then selects the student who will answer the question. How the student is selected is a matter for debate, whether it be targeted or random, the overall effect on the students is hopefully the same as they do not know who will answer the question until they have all had time to consider their answer. Cold calling is most effective when paired with other questioning techniques like probing follow-up questions and expecting students build on previous answers to create ever increasing levels of sophistication in their responses.


Why is cold calling so effective?


Cold calling acts to engage all students in the thinking process, which is critical to develop their understanding of the concepts being taught. This is because students who don’t know in advance who will be expected to answer questions, are much more likely to be engaged in the learning and therefor students’ attention is more often focused on lesson content. There are also other indirect advantages of cold calling, for example the teacher gets a much more balanced view of what students in the room understand, a view which takes into account all students and not just those willing to volunteer. Cold calling also helps to build student-teacher relationships as friendly, tactful, and sensitive cold calling ensures students are actively involved by the teacher which can lead to a sense of being valued as a learner and help build a sense of the class becoming a learning community.


Why we couldn’t call it a “hands down” questioning approach?


The idea of cold call questioning is so logical, almost obvious, that it is possible to assume that a whole school could easily become a “hands-down” school. In fact, when explaining to students why all teachers would be consistently applying cold calling in their lessons, it seemed sensible to call it a “hands-down” approach. Hands-up vs hands-down is easily visible and highly tangible. Therefore it appeared from the outset that making it a consistent expectation for students to have their hands down during class discussion would be a feasible whole school approach. It seemed the most likely route to ensure that everyone in the school community moved quickly from a mixed questioning approach (that sometimes depended heavily on volunteers) to a consistently applied, cold calling approach. This is because hands up to answer questions in class would be an obvious signal to teachers and leaders that the approach was not yet fully embedded.


However, this initial attempt to embed cold calling using the tag line of “hands-down” questioning had unforeseen consequences on classroom discussion and teacher questioning. The first and most obvious was that although we had included, in our launch, the idea that students could still put their hand up to ask questions, we had not foreseen that “spontaneous contributions” would also need to be included under this pretext. Students still needed to use hands up as a polite and non-disruptive way to signal to the teacher that they wanted to make a contribution to class discussion that was not related to a specific question.


Another unforeseen impact was that teachers endeavoured to follow the school “hands-down” approach even when it logically should have been abandoned. For example, sometimes multiple students were being asked and the lack of correct response was potentially causing confusion. Or at other times teachers found themselves unable to ask questions where not all students could be expected to answer, for example a question that asked about links to an option subject that not all students study.


These issues led us to quickly refine our whole school questioning approach, removing the “hands-down” tag line and moving to a much more nuanced and context specific approach to cold calling.


The nuances of cold-calling:


Hands-down/cold-call questioning can only be effectively used when everyone is expected to have the knowledge or could realistically be expected to use their knowledge to formulate an answer. Therefor questions that check understanding of a new concept or retrieval strength for a previous one are great candidates for carefully orchestrated cold-calling.


However, questions like – “Can anyone tell us what is like to have an X-ray?” or “Can anyone describe where they may have heard of chlorine gas in their history lessons?” – are not questions where all students are expected to have an answer. These I would refer to as “contribution seeking questions” and although not specifically geared to knowledge acquisition they have their benefits. For example, bringing ideas from students into the discussion, allowing eager students to “get their fix” and increasing pace and engagement. Contribution seeking questions are hands up questions and innately rely on volunteers.


Another nuance of cold calling is being very deliberate about when to abandon it. Even the most experienced teachers can pose a well thought out question and be surprised that the responses from students show lack of knowledge. In this case continued cold calling just results in prolonged boring class discussion or, in the worst case, students confusing each other with half-baked ideas and misconceptions. When around 3 students have been selected and a correct response remains elusive the teacher has 2 options: Either allow volunteers to raise hands and contribute, this works best if it’s a relatively easy fix, but it is essential that the volunteers’ answers are then followed by cold calling of other students. Known as “no opt out”, students who previously couldn’t answer are expected to respond now having received additional input. Or for more substantial concepts, reteach the material and then begin cold calling again once students have had an alternative or more structured delivery from the teacher.


These nuances meant we moved from calling our academy approach “hands-down questioning”, to “targeted questioning” as it implied a greater degree of professional judgement about how and when different approaches should be used. Now we ensure we are clear with students about when hands up are allowed and when they are not, but with cold-calling being at the centre of class discussion students accept quite readily that the teacher will select the responder and the positive impact on student engagement is evident across our academy.


Cat Rushton

@CatherineRusht2

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