Key points
- Executing Cold Call requires a sophisticated set of teaching moves
- Implementing non-volunteers in isolation is unhelpful for teachers and students
- Randomising student selection can become a barrier to developing the very judgment teachers need to differentiate and scaffold questioning
- The most important part of Cold Call is the decision-making teachers do
Building the craft of Cold Call
It’s tempting to rush to implement Cold Call, because it’s just calling on kids. How hard can it be? Rushing implementation of Cold Call is a mistake because it’s a multi-faceted craft that takes time to hone. The most visible bit — selecting a student — takes a split-second. But that’s the tip of an instructional iceberg incorporating several instructional moves and nuanced decision-making.
Defining Cold Call
I define Cold Call like this: Without waiting for a volunteer, the teacher invites a student to respond to a specific question or prompt.
In line with Doug Lemov’s conception of Cold Call, notice that the selection is driven by teachers (not randomised). Here’s how I’d codify it.
Cold Call
Step 1 Pose a question or statement (and repeat it)
“I want everyone to think of one concrete noun, and one abstract noun. One concrete noun, one abstract noun. Everyone thinking.”
Step 2 Prompt students to practice or rehearse responses
“In your workbooks, let’s jot down your two nouns. One concrete, one abstract.
15 seconds. Go.”
Step 3 Scan student responses
Use active proximity to check a sample of student responses. Who is writing? Who’s ready to share? Who is lost? Who has similar nouns? Impressive nouns? What are the patterns/trends? Who might benefit most from sharing?
Step 4 Using warm tone and body language, select students to share
“Grade 3, I see so many great nouns! Jessica, we’ll start with you, then we’ll go to Abi who I see working extra hard today. Listen in to Jess and Abi’s nouns, because in a second I’ll be asking if your nouns were similar, the same, or different. Go for it, Jess.”
Selecting students is skilled work
Cold Call incorporates many skills beyond just “picking a non-volunteer”. So what are those skills, and what does it mean for implementation of Cold Call in schools?
The skills of Cold Calling
When I see teachers use Cold Call beautifully, it’s usually because they are doing a combination of these things:
- They routinely prompt all students to interact in some way before Cold Calling (e.g. pair share, mini whiteboards, guided note-taking, etc.)
- They rove with purpose, monitoring what students know and can do
- They know what responses they are looking for: they know the curriculum and the kinds of errors, similarities, trends they may want to highlight
- They make mental notes of how student ideas are related/similar/different
- They differentiate their tone and prompts in response to student-level factors — more encouragement and warmth for a student who requires it, a slightly harder question for a higher attaining student who can deal with pace/challenge, a sentence frame repeated for a student who requires a language support
None of this is random. Every instructional move is imbued with judgment and care.
Why tins of sticks don’t help
If you randomise Cold Calling, it’s entirely possible that you skip the development of these skills altogether. If you rely on rattling a tin and pulling a student’s name on a stick, what is the point in listening intently to capture ideas around the room?
Where is the incentive to consider how you will differentiate your Cold Call to suit the individual? How are you thinking about your tone and framing for specific students?
The selection mechanism itself is doing almost none of the meaningful instructional work.
Are sticks a scaffold for building teacher confidence though?
A few years ago after a ResearchEd conference, I was chuffed to find myself at the pub talking about Cold Calling with Josh Goodrich. Josh really knows his stuff, and so I was intrigued to know how he conceptualised the technique. It was a fleeting conversation, but I’ve thought a lot about it since.
Josh argued that the randomised method (e.g. drawing sticks) helps beginning teachers build confidence in Cold Calling. I’ve remained open to this possibility, but on balance it doesn’t chime with my experience.
In my experience, the practice of drawing sticks bypasses the exact kind of nuanced thinking most expert teachers do as part of cold calling. I’ve observed time and time again that teachers who use sticks can become more (not less) wedded to them. (And so the kids too learn that this is the “fairest way” to ask questions.) The sticks solve the problem of choosing a student to ask, and in turn provide no incentive for teachers to get better at judging this themselves.
Equity and excellence, in all aspects of teaching, cannot be achieved by lottery.
A better route to building Cold Call expertise
Priority 1: Support your teachers to unlearn the habit of inviting participation as a default practice (“Who knows? Who can tell me?”)
Priority 2: Support your teachers to become practised at the hardest thing of all – securing every student’s participation. Develop school- or faculty-wide techniques for this to happen regularly in every single lesson.
Priority 3: Layer in active roving/scanning, cold calling with intention, as if you know your students really well (because you do).
Staffroom reflections
- When we Cold Call, what information are we using to decide who to invite to respond?
- What all-student response routines are we using routinely? How are they giving us useful information before we Cold Call?
- How well do we rove, scan and listen while students are thinking, writing or talking? When in lessons is this roving most important?
- How might we adjust the framing, difficulty or level of support in a Cold Call for different students?
