Cold Call

Many teachers are working hard to implement Cold Call. Executed well, it’s a thing of beauty, but increasingly I think schools should prioritise implementing a core set of all-student response techniques (e.g. Mini Whiteboards). Here’s why I think they should come first.

No matter how well scripted, Cold Call only works brilliantly in classrooms where there is an abundance of student activity. Everyone thinking, everyone writing, everyone underlining the verb, everyone saying the target vocab word, everyone locating the coordinate.

All-student response routines generate this culture; without these all-in activities, Cold Call is harder to do well. Teachers are less sure what (and how) students are thinking. Kids can be caught off guard; they clamber for answers. The lesson loses pace.

In my experience, when Cold Call isn’t working well, teachers abandon the technique. They sense it not landing. They realise it isn’t helping to cause thinking. They note the silences, the pauses, the lack of flow in the lesson. They revert to asking for hands up/volunteers.

When I see this happening, the issue isn’t with Cold Call per se. The problem is that it’s being implemented in the absence of all-student response systems. If we invest in all-student response systems first, we give ourselves a better chance of Cold Calling fulfilling its great potential.

Once we’ve established some core routines for assessing all students’ thinking simultaneously (e.g. Mini Whiteboards), we have fertile ground for Cold Calling. It is immediately less effortful. It needn’t be perfect. Students are primed. Teachers have evidence of thinking to work with.

In the room where everyone has had a chance to write, the teacher’s Cold Call immediately sounds different: “Grace, you feverishly wrote 7 common nouns! Fabulous work – let’s start with you sharing one, and then we’ll hear from a few others.” We’re set for success.

Cold Call pedants will note I’ve committed a cardinal sin in my example here. I put Grace’s name up front! But it doesn’t matter too much, because I embedded wait/think time in the 20-second Mini Whiteboard task. Now, the exact framing of the Cold Call matters less.

Of course over time, we can work on refining the framing of our Cold Calling, and ideally, we make a habit of saying the student’s name last to maximise thinking. But implementing it at all has been made easier and better for having an all-in response routine established first. We’ve laid a good foundation for positive directed questioning that secures success and builds momentum.

School and system leaders who want to increase the ratio of thinking and participation in classrooms are onto a good thing in Cold Call, but we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of first establishing all-in student response techniques. They form the foundation for so many other brilliant aspects of explicit and responsive instruction.

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