Questioning Technique Blog

    I’ve been using cold calling from day one, essentially. There are only five kids in my class, so it’s an easy way to make sure everyone is paying attention and participating. The more I use it, the more comfortable the shyer kids are with speaking up. Now pretty much everyone willingly raises their hand to answer questions, so it may even be outliving its usefulness. At the beginning of summer school at least two of the kids were very hard to draw out and get to participate. I can’t say for sure that cold-calling is the reason that they’re participating more, but I think that it is.
       Of course, the class dynamic with five kids is much different than it will be in the fall with thirty, but I think the underlying principle of cold-calling, that people become more comfortable the more they are forced to participate and that knowing you could get called on raises your awareness of what’s going on, still applies.
    What I do is not strict cold-calling, since it’s not entirely random (which would be stupid with five kids). I pay attention to who seems engaged and who doesn’t, and try to involve the kids who don’t . This is easy in a class of five, probably not in a class of thirty. Also, none of my kids are so shy that they seem mortified by being called on and refuse to answer, which I’m sure will happen in the fall. I don't know exactly what I'll do when that happens, but I hope that gradually over the course of the year that all the kids will get more comfortable.