Mr B asks Danny a question. Danny’s answer is quiet, so Mr B steps towards him and says “could you speak up?” Danny repeats his answer and Mr B says “thank you” and continues with his teaching sequence.

If I observe this, and I’m standing at the back of the room, likelihood is that I can’t hear Danny when he gives his answer a second time. To check that it’s not just me, I go to other students in the room and quietly ask them what Danny said, and ordinarily they can’t tell me. This is obviously not good, as in the short term it means the other students are missing out on what could be a valuable answer from Danny or valuable feedback from Mr B, and over the long term means that a culture of low participation ratio can develop.

Danny asks Mr B a question. Mr B steps towards him and answers the question.

In this case, there isn’t an issue around volume, but there’s something else that worries me, so I go to other students and ask “what was Mr B’s answer to Danny’s question?” As above, ordinarily they can’t tell me. The problem, therefore, is not just with the volume, but with the message you send to the rest of the class around participation. By stepping towards one student, keeping eye contact with them and addressing them directly, you subconsciously communicate to the rest of the room that they don’t need to be listening now.

This second case is important, because some might say the way to fix the first case is by asking the student to speak up. This might help, but in my opinion and experience isn’t enough to actively signal to the class to listen.

Mr B is standing in the front right of the classroom. He asks a question to Danny, and immediately starts walking to the front left of the room. He switches his eye contact from Danny to scanning the rest of the class, and ensures that his body is facing to the room, rather than to Danny directly.

Mr B achieves three things here:

  1. Without saying anything, he increases the chances of Danny speaking more audibly.
  2. By moving across the room, breaking eye contact and keeping his body facing as much of the room as possible, he communicates to every member of the class that they cannot switch off at this point.
  3. By scanning the room rather than focusing on Danny, he can see if students appear to be listening or not.

As such, a useful action step following the WHENWHYBY* approach could be:

When verbally questioning one student
Signal to the rest of the class that the conversation includes them
By stepping away from the speaker

This is the first post in (hopefully) a new series called MCA, which stands for Most Common Actions. The posts are going to be very short, and will focus on small things teachers can do to make their classrooms more inclusive and hopefully lead to high participation and levels of thought. The basic principle behind these posts is that I get to see a lot of lessons, and give lots of feedback. Often, that feedback is quite specific to a particular teacher and context, but normally the feedback is generalisable to other classrooms, and comes up quite frequently. I call items like these MCAs – because they are my most common actions. The order in which I write them is the order in which I think of them, so don’t infer from the fact that one action is number 5 and another is number 6 that number 5 is somehow more important.

They are heavily influenced by ideas from Teach Like a Champion, Get Better Faster and my boss Thanos Gidaropoulos. Whilst I might not reference every individual thing, assume that if the idea makes sense it is because I got it from one of those sources, and if it doesn’t it’s because I made it up. I strongly advise all teachers to pick up a copy of Teach Like a Champion and all leaders a copy of Get Better Faster.

*The WHENWHYBY approach is an update of The Power of By. Broadly:

  • When: this tells us the type of activity you might be engaged in when this action step becomes relevant. E.g. “verbal questioning”, “independent practice”, “checking for understanding.”
    Including “when” is important because not every strategy applies all the time.
  • Why: this tells us the overall purpose of this action. E.g. “increase ratio“, “reduce chances of poor behaviour.”
    Including “why” is important not only because teachers are not robots, but also because there may be other strategies that can achieve similar ends and can be used instead of or alongside the strategy in question.
  • By: this is the strategy itself. E.g. “stepping away from the speaker.”
    Including “by” is important because we need to be able to give teachers something to actually do.

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