I am very lucky in that I get to see a lot of lessons. In this series, I share the “most common actions” (MCAs) that I find myself asking teachers to take as part of my feedback. The series starts with the first MCA here.

Mr B is about to start a lesson on leaf structure, and wants to recap photosynthesis. He asks “What are the products of photosynthesis?“

David calls out “glucose and oxygen“. Mr B says “Yes that’s correct…today we are going to look at…“

This scenario is deeply problematic for a number of reasons:

  1. Behaviour confrontation: students who call out once, call out again. Almost every time that I observe this happening, at some point later in the lesson the teacher has a go at a student calling out. Maybe they called out at the wrong time, maybe they called out a joke or something because they thought that was the vibe – it doesn’t matter. The point is that the student won’t understand why it’s a problem this time, and you will end up getting in a confrontation (and everybody loses).
  2. Behaviour nucleation: have you ever had that moment when you are talking to a student and suddenly – seemingly out of nowhere – there’s noise across the classroom? Nobody’s messing around or being rude, but they are all just…chatting. This noise always starts somewhere, and I call this nucleation (it’s part of why Golden Silence is so important). One site of common nucleation is a student calling out.
  3. Inclusion: in a classroom dominated by students calling out, quiet students or students who want to “do the right thing” have their voices neglected and excluded. They could go an entire lesson, day or week with their voice never being heard by a teacher, which for me is a problem even if they are alert and attentive.
  4. Ratio: in a classroom dominated by students calling out, it’s a lot easier for students to drift off and not participate. They will never be called on, they will never be picked, so they become habituated to not participating in lessons.
  5. Assessment – sample size: when Mr B says “yes that’s correct” and moves on, he is assuming that the rest of the class understands this content. This is a bad assumption, as he is extrapolating from one student to thirty. This is too small a sample to justify an extrapolation.
  6. Assessment – sample selection: the student who calls out the answer almost definitely knows it. We learn nothing from the fact that this student knows it – of course he does. But what about the others? They are often less likely to know the answer, but because we’ve heard from the loudest and most confident, we assume that they know it too. It’s like doing a survey about whether a school’s behaviour policy is fair and only asking the worst behaved students in the school. You won’t learn all that much.

I get to visit a lot of schools and observe hundreds of lessons. In the overwhelming majority of lessons I’ve seen, students have called out at least once and not been challenged on it. In most lessons, it’s more than once, and in some lessons it is the dominant method of teacher – student interaction. In light of the above, it’s hard to see how that isn’t concerning.

Normally, the calling out isn’t challenged, and is welcomed. Sometimes I see things like

“yes that’s right, but don’t call out next time”

This is pretty toothless, and I imagine the student hears the first clause and not the second. I see it, I make a prediction that student will call out again, and the prediction turns out right 9 times out of 10 within the next five minutes.

In future MCAs we will look at better ways to question, but for the minute it is important to do two things: stop it happening to start with, and if it does happen, challenge it. For the former, Front Loading Means of Participation is definitely the right place to start:

Without calling out, can anyone tell me what the products of photosynthesis are?
With a hand in the air, can anyone tell me what the products of photosynthesis are?

Means of Participation: with a hand in the air
Front Loading: putting that instruction before the question

Approaches like this are more likely to result in students not calling out. No guarantees, but more likely.

If a student does call out, I tend to do something like this:

Danny calls out
Mr B puts a hand out to gesture “stop”, says “in this classroom we don’t call out,” and immediately breaks eye contact and looks out at the room and repeats the question.

If the student does it again, then there has to be some kind of consequence. Hopefully they won’t (and this may help if they do). The idea is to make it clear that we will not acknowledge the call out, it simply isn’t part of the acceptable discourse. We make a quick statement and break eye contact because we don’t want to get in a discussion or argument about it. We want to communicate the message and move on sharpish. Done.

As above, we will do better questioning strategies soon, but following WHENWHYBY our two action steps now are:

MCA4a
When verbally questioning students
Prevent calling out
By Front Loading Your Means of Participation

And

MCA4b
When a student calls out
Ensure it doesn’t happen again
By challenging it directly

This is the fourth post in a new series called MCA, which stands for Most Common Actions. You can read more about the series here.

The strategies here 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.

If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, please subscribe to the blog by scrolling to the bottom of the home page.