All Hands Up with Eight-year-olds

Working out a questioning technique in an elementary context

Like many teachers, I found a lot appealing about Pritesh Raichura's practice of “All Hands Up Cold Calling”. If you are unfamiliar, this is a questioning technique where the teacher asks a question and every student raises their hand. The teacher then selects someone to answer. Raichura has written great explanations of this practice. In contrast to All Hands Up, we could use “no-hands-up” cold calling, well explained and justified here by Tom Sherrington (among other places by other authors). Here, the teacher asks a question, waits, and then selects a student to answer. A third alternative, the most common if not default questioning technique of American schools, is the teacher asking a question, some hands going up, and the teacher choosing a volunteer to answer.

All Hands Up questioning immediately appealed to me because it exemplifies a culture of attention and participation. Everyone pays attention, and everyone participates. As Anita Archer says, “Everyone does Everything!” Beyond that, everyone wants to answer. Everyone wants to be called on. And, every time everyone puts their hand up to answer a question, these cultural values are made visible.

Sherrington shared a reflection on Raichura’s description of All Hands Up, in which he confessed to finding it awkward and being unconvinced of its advantages. While I think that’s still a justifiable position in many classroom contexts, I’ve found All Hands Up to offer distinct advantages over cold calling. Raichura has described these previously, and I’ve appreciated many of his insights after using the method this year. I don’t take credit for the insights below, but they bear repeating, perhaps with some considerations for an elementary setting.

Delaying Means of Participation

All Hands Up allows teachers to delay the means of participation until they have more information about the class’s response to the question. I get information about what’s going on in everyone’s heads when I observe how they respond to the question. Do their hands immediately shoot up? Do they timidly raise a hand? Are most of them thinking for some time before raising a hand? Are a few not raising a hand at all? While I’m waiting and watching, I’m already forming a hypothesis about the question and deciding my next step. Maybe what I’m seeing makes me want to have them talk to a partner. Maybe I want them to respond chorally. Maybe I want to rephrase the question entirely. Maybe I want to re-explain and then ask again. If I am just going to call on someone, I have more information to strategically select a student because I gain information when observing how they raise their hand. If a typically less confident student's hand shot up immediately, maybe I want to reward that by calling on them. I never have to think about this stuff before I ask the question, I do it during the wait time and while I'm gaining information based on how they raise their hands.

Culture of Attention

All Hands Up also builds a culture of attention. First, it immediately reveals who is lost or is failing to pay attention. Every question becomes a check for attention before anyone answers. With traditional cold calling, a student's attentiveness is revealed only after the teacher chooses a responder, and then it only reveals one person’s attentiveness. It also can fail to provide a distinction between a failure of attention and a failure of understanding. With all hands up, as soon as I finish a question, I can begin to see who is paying attention. Because everyone knows inattentiveness will invariably be revealed whenever a question is asked, they're incentivized to pay attention to begin with. The consequence of inattentiveness is certain and consistent rather than intermittent. They can’t hope to get lucky and not be called on. If they’re drifting away, I’m able to bring them back quickly and consistently. Their peers also provide a visible model of attentiveness. In a no-hands-up context, the difference between paying attention and not is less visible and the culture of attentiveness is less vibrant.

Adapting to a Primary Setting

My context is quite different from Raichura’s, though, and I learned some things in adapting it to a primary setting of eight- and nine-year-olds.

First, the explicit premise of All Hands Up is that everyone ought to be able to answer every question. This is a radical notion in many American elementary schools. Younger students are less personally responsible for what they know and what they don’t than older pupils. Because of this, teachers are often justifiably cautious about revealing the sometimes vast disparities in the knowledge and abilities of our students. For similar reasons, teachers resist no-hands-up cold-calling or use it delicately. But our questioning habits betray another belief: we didn’t teach well enough for everyone to know the answer to our question. Or worse, our teaching didn’t ever occur with the expectation of everyone learning the material.

To successfully implement All Hands Up, I first have to reconcile my expectation that everyone learns everything with my knowledge of existing differences in ability and attainment. Second, I have to teach well enough that it’s fair to expect everyone in the room to know the answers to the questions. Of course, the questioning technique is part of the teaching. All Hands Up allows for frequent and efficient retrieval or rehearsal, which helps everyone learn. I have come to appreciate that All Hands Up is somewhat self-reinforcing. Because it makes my instruction more effective, more of the class learns more of the material more of the time, which lets me ask more questions which returns to create more effective instruction. It’s a virtuous cycle. It also gives me more feedback about the quality of my teaching which helps me improve it.

Early on, some students struggled to understand that everyone’s participation included theirs. Building a culture of All Hands Up is easier in school cultures that publicize high achievement, but again, I think progressive American elementary schools shy away from this because we, justifiably, understand that young children have much less control over their achievement than older or secondary students. The differences in ability between eight-year-olds lie less within their locus of control than between fourteen-year-olds. So, primary teachers are cautious about revealing the ability levels of their students, and they select questioning techniques accordingly. However, we also desperately need everyone to be learning. If we think we can teach better when everyone is paying attention, practicing, and thinking, we should do that. We should also teach well enough that everyone can answer every question. If we do our jobs well, our class’s abilities and knowledge should converge, upwardly, as the year advances.

I have also found value in teaching students both the purpose of asking them questions and how they should feel when don't know something. To that end, I explicitly explain and remind the class that trying to remember knowledge helps our brains learn it and makes it easier to recall it in the future. When someone answers a question incorrectly or incompletely, I reinforce that it's great they took a risk, that our brains never remember perfectly, and that making a mistake will help them remember the correct answer once they hear it again. Creating an understanding of why I ask questions spans other practices in our classroom, too. When we take little retrieval quizzes here and there, I often echo my explanation about retrieval. As the year has gone on, however, I’ve replaced a lot of these paper-based retrieval activities with All Hands Up questioning. It’s a quicker feedback loop and often the better option. 

Combining with a Good Behavior Game

Raichura describes reinforcing All Hands Up with his school’s merit system, which practically no American elementary school has. After doing All Hands Up without any external reinforcement, I found a need for something to boost the present-day rewards for participation. The authentic intrinsic rewards of learning are mostly only gained in the future while all the effort is required in the present. Artificially bringing some rewards into the present is often both appropriate and necessary. They need not be significant; it only takes a little bit.

I use a Good Behavior Game to reinforce participation with positive peer attention. This is perhaps the best-researched behavior intervention available to us, notwithstanding a truly terrible name. Going into detail on how and why it works is beyond the scope of this discussion, but the magic active ingredient is creating a strong mechanism of rewarding desired behaviors with positive peer attention. My class is split into four teams. When everyone on a team raises their hand to answer a question, their team gets a tally on the board. Each day, their team earns a small privilege if they reach a certain point total. Our current reward is almost comically minor; the real reward is peer attention. Slower-responding or reluctant students receive positive attention from their peers as soon as their hand goes up. Their teammates are thrilled when the final member of their team raises their hand because only then do I credit their team with a tally on the board. The least confident and slowest responder on each team is getting an immediate reward for participating. They get to be the one who was the most proximate cause of their team getting a tally for that question.

Sometimes, if they’re slow to raise their hand and begin feeling peer pressure, they'll whisper to their teammate that they really have no idea. Their teammate will whisper to them the answer, and then their hand will go up. This is also good! The whole purpose of this phase of questioning is retrieval and rehearsal. They failed to retrieve; that already happened whether they now get told the answer or not. So they need to be told the correct answer somehow. If it’s whispered to them by a teammate, I can then call on them to have them rehearse the answer they just were told. Or, if there's a lot of slow hands and whispering, I can reteach or have everyone talk to a partner to rehearse the answer.

This combination of All Hands Up and the Good Behavior Game also forces me to have adequate wait time. After I ask a question, I have to scan each team to see if I can give them a tally on the board. We have a clear criterion of every hand being up, so I won't self-sabotage and call on someone before that happens. The kids call me out if I do because I robbed their team of a chance to earn a tally if I ever call on someone too quickly. 

Rather than questioning being the students’ opponent where choosing someone to answer is how the teacher compels attention and reveals confusion, questioning has become the student’s ally. I already know who is confused (their hands went up slowly or shyly) and who isn't paying attention (their hands didn’t go up without their teammates reminding them) before I pick someone to answer. I can correct both confusion and inattentiveness without singling anyone out. Choosing someone to answer is a reward rather than a punishment because I’m never using my choice of respondee to try to reveal inattentiveness. Furthermore, more questions mean greater opportunity for each team to earn points. We now have a culture where students want me to ask them questions. And, when we’re struggling to achieve full participation, I know either the question was unclear or I need to reteach. It’s rarely a lack of motivation to participate because we’ve addressed that through other means.

Building Identity

Against the advice to avoid language that includes phrases like “who knows...” or “who can explain...”, I now occasionally include this in my questions. While slightly less economical than just asking the question, it encourages students to identify with knowing the answer. I want them to raise their hand with the thought of “I’m the one who can explain!” or “I’m the one who knows!” That’s kind of exactly the identity we want them to have. I think in some elementary classroom cultures, teachers perhaps rightly shy away from forcing students to identify with their response because, as adults, we know the children are rarely the ones responsible for whether they know it or not. If we’ve taught everyone effectively, though, it’s healthy to encourage kids to take ownership of their learning. I want them to internalize that all the attention, thinking, effort, and practice is who they are as learners. When I frame a question with “who...” most people are a little prouder or more eager to answer. I don’t do it all the time, and I doubt it’s a hugely important active ingredient here, but it does warrant a mention.

Combining with Calls to Attention

Finally, I attach retrieval questions to every call to attention. This improves our call to attention because students know the first thing they’ll attend to is a question they can answer, and they like answering questions. More importantly, attaching a question to every call to attention forces me to constantly pepper in tiny bits of retrieval practice throughout our day. Kids catch me if I forget because they want the opportunity to answer questions if only to earn their team a tally.

Conclusion

Questioning can efficiently achieve many critical parts of teaching, including retrieval, rehearsal, and checking understanding. When used as a formative assessment, it becomes a tool for building relationships. Checking what they know and understand is how we show them what we do matters and that we care if they learn it. Adjusting our teaching based on what we learn from checks for understanding or checks for retrieval demonstrates the same. All Hands Up questioning has become something I like because of how much it accomplishes and students like because of how it makes them about their learning.