Key points
- Opportunities to respond (OTRs) are an essential ingredient in responsive and explicit instruction
- All checks for understanding are an opportunity to respond, but not all opportunities to respond are a check for understanding
- Different types of OTRs serve different purposes; combining them helps maintain momentum and increase individual accountability to learning
- Both quality and quantity of OTRs matters; knowing your current OTR rate in different portions of lessons is useful for improving your teaching
- Securing the right OTR rate is a powerful way to make teaching more interactive
What is an opportunity to respond?
An opportunity to respond (OTR) is any gesture, prompt, question or cue that is designed to illicit a student response (Department of Education, 2024).
You are offering an OTR any time you prompt students to do something – to circle the noun, to point to the larger fraction, to measure out a cup of flour, to read the first paragraph of the novel out loud, to mould a ball from a lump of clay, to respond to a True/False question.
All checks for understanding are an OTR, but not all OTRs are a check for understanding.
While checks for understanding are critically important, on their own they are insufficient for interactive and engaging teaching. We need to provide other OTRs to sustain momentum and to include all learners.
In this post, I unpack OTRs, exploring the benefit of generating a lot of them. Let’s start by looking at types and examples.
Types and examples
There are 2 main categories for OTRs: prompts for all students, and prompts for individuals. Within those categories, there are two types: verbal and non-verbal.
All students
Verbal
e.g. Choral response, choral reading, turn & talk
Non-verbal
e.g. Mini whiteboards, gesture responses (T/F), “Everyone put your finger under the heading Industrial Revolution”
Individuals
Verbal
e.g. Cold call or selecting a volunteer to answer a question
Non-verbal
As above, but prompting an individual (not a group)
Combining OTR types
Using a mixture of OTRs types is helpful, because different OTRs achieve different things. All-student responses (e.g. mini whiteboards) maximise momentum and provide a good sample of understanding, while individual responses (e.g. cold call) allow for deeper exploration of thinking. It’s also helpful to have fluency with many modes, because some students will have strengths that lend themselves to different OTR types, e.g. an EAL student may find a gesture response or scaffolded paired discussion task more accessible than an extended written prompt or on-the-spot cold call.
This doesn’t mean we tailor our OTRs to particular learning styles (because they don’t exist), nor does it mean that we don’t expose all students to tasks that develop their knowledge and skills in appropriate ways. But this does recognise that students have different preferences (how they like to participate at certain times) and different needs.
Why are OTRs so important?
OTRs support desirable behaviour
Let’s start by imagining a teaching scenario in which there are no OTRs; picture a lecturer standing at the front of the room – explaining concepts, or modelling procedures or reading material out loud – but ten minutes go by, twenty minutes go by, and they haven’t yet prompted you to do anything with the incoming information.
What behaviours might you start to engage in? Slouching in your chair? Mind wandering? Thoughts of something more pressing to you? A few tabs open on your laptop, and suddenly you’re shopping the latest sale. Look around and what do you see? Glazed looks on faces, whispered chat between friends.
One of our jobs as teachers is to make it as easy as possible for students to pay attention; a teacher who offers few OTRs is making it more difficult for students to engage in positive behaviours for learning.
OTRs provide feedback on whether students are listening
When we are teaching, it’s sometimes hard to tell the degree to which students are really tuned in (particularly if we teach in a school where compliant behaviours are the norm).
We’ve all had the experience of thinking students are eating out of the palm of our hands, only to discover that many of them were indeed preoccupied with thoughts about that magpie out the window.
We misread engagement all the time because we work in what Robert Hogarth might call “a wicked environment” (2001). In classrooms, feedback loops to teachers are fuzzy; we cannot see attention, so it’s hard to know if we’ve got it.
If we presume (and I think we should) that school-aged children’s attention will meander throughout any given lesson, then we need some mechanism by which we can judge what they’re attending to, particularly at important points in a lesson. OTRs serve us here.
What can this sound like in the classroom?
“I’ve just explained those 3 key steps. 3 key steps for you there, Year 8.
We straighten the paper, place the template carefully on top, then we slice it – starting on the left side.
Tell your partner those 3 steps, ready to share back with the class so we know we’ve all got it. You have 15 seconds. Go.”
Here, the Visual Arts teacher cleverly uses an all-student verbal OTR (Turn & Talk) to get a sense of how well students have listened to her instructions, before she moves on.
Bonus: A student who has mind-wandered during the initial instruction now has a chance to tune back in and benefit from their peer’s explanation.
Double bonus: By incorporating OTRs after instructions, the teacher sets a standard for listening, indicating that she values it.
Triple bonus: If the teacher’s explanation was unclear in the first place, she will get a sense of that as she hears the class respond. She can re-explain aspects of the instruction now if she needs to.
OTRs promote academic learning
The research to support OTRs often lives in papers about classroom and behaviour management. This is a shame, because OTRs are critically important in supporting academic learning, too.
Let’s imagine we are teaching a new piece of vocabulary – hesitant. It is students, not the teacher, who need to practice pronouncing the word, saying the word, putting it into a sentence, describing a time when they have felt hesitant.
Yes, a high OTR rate is important because it supports engagement, but it directly supports learning too – in this case, learning the meaning and accurate application of the word hesitant.
What’s the optimal rate of OTRs?
Quality and quantity of OTRs matters. During teaching of new material, a rate of 3 – 5 OTRs per minute (averaged across a lesson) is a good bet for engagement (Reinke et al., 2012 cite 4 – 6 OTRs per minute, but this can be a big ask if you are new to this).
In my work with teachers, I find a baseline of 2 – 3 per minute is a good ballpark rate to aim for, particularly when teaching brand new concepts or procedures – but in truth, there is no set ideal rate. The required rate is mediated by many things, including the age of the learner, the nature of the task, and other factors.
In the vast majority of lessons I observe, I think the OTR rate could be higher. In the vast majority of lessons I observe, I think an OTR rate of 3 – 5 per minute would drastically improve engagement and learning. But having a set rate in mind is not always helpful.
That’s because the ideal OTR rate must be considered in light of the nature of what we are teaching.
There is no one “right rate”
When teaching students to sing a new song, or when introducing a new letter-sound correspondences in a phonics lesson, we might find that 3 OTRs per minute is not nearly enough for the required rate of practice. Similarly, when reviewing previously taught material, 3 – 5 OTRs per minute may be too few because students should already have knowledge in long term memory, ready for swift retrieval.
3 OTRs per minute, in another context, might in fact prove far too many. Imagine you are reading a lengthy poem to your class; your intent is to read it in its entirety, so that students can enjoy its arc, its language, the word choice and imagery.
Your focus here will likely be modelling beautiful rate and expression; perhaps you’ll pause at several points, leaving moments of extended silence so the right words hang in the air. In this instance, a preoccupation with hitting a rate of 3 OTRs per minute would undoubtedly make your teaching worse. The same can be said for countless other instructional scenarios.
Be very wary of hard and fast advice about “correct” rates of OTRs.
There is significant professional judgment required to offer the right level of OTRs in any given lesson. In my experience, when teachers receive nuanced professional learning about OTRs, they make staggeringly good judgments about how to ratchet the OTR rate up and down in light of the many contextual factors at play.
Calculating your rate of OTRs
Knowing your OTR rate in any given phase of any given lesson is incredibly helpful.
Using simple video (or even just audio) recording, we can calculate our OTR rate across an 8 – 10 minute segment of any lesson.
Use the table below to tally the OTRs you give in that time. (Alternatively, ask a colleague to drop in for 10 minutes to do it for you.) Divide your total by the number of minutes to get your rate, and have a look at the mix of types.
Total rate of OTRs (per minute): _____________________
When you first tally your OTR rate, it might be lower than you hoped. Be assured that it takes a lot of practice to offer high rates of OTRs!
The most fun to be had is to compare notes with a teacher who has taught the exact same lesson as you. What OTRs are you both offering? How do you both sustain engagement? What kinds of OTRs do you think you could add in for a better spread of response types?
These are fruitful professional conversations.
Wrapping up
As Scott, Hirn and Cooper (2017) put it so well, teachers can take advantage of every precious instructional minute by creating maximum opportunities to respond. Examining the types of OTRs you offer, and the rate at which they are offered, is a great way to reflect on (and improve) the interactivity of your teaching.
Staffroom reflections
- How consistently are we offering opportunities to respond in our classrooms? Do we know what high-quality OTRs look like in practice, and how do we judge this?
- How many examples or recordings do we have of strong OTR implementation across our school? How could we go about getting some data?
- What might we see if there is a low OTR rate in any given lesson? What off-task behaviours give us a clue that we should increase our OTR rate?
- What professional learning might help teachers improve both the frequency and quality of OTRs in their lessons?
References
Department of Education Victoria. (2024). Positive Classroom Management Strategies: Getting Started Guide. Melbourne: State Government of Victoria.
Department of Education Victoria. (2024). Opportunities to respond (OTR) [Placemat Strategy 6]. State Government of Victoria.
Hogarth, R. (2001). Educating Intuition. University of Chicago Press.
Reinke, W. M., Herman, K. C., & Stormont, M. (2013). Classroom-level positive behavior supports in schools implementing SW‑PBIS: Identifying areas for enhancement. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 15(1), 39–50.
Scott, T. M., Hirn, R., & Cooper, J. T. (2017). Teacher and student behaviors: Keys to success in classroom instruction. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Acknowledgement
I want to acknowledge my friend and colleague Karina Stocker for developing my knowledge in this area over the past three years. It is only because of Karina’s professional generosity, and my close collaborations with her, that I’m aware of this research evidence and the practical ways we can support teachers to enhance their use of OTRs.
