It’s always bothered me in musicals when we have (Reprise) songs. I certainly understand that you want to re-use themes later in the musical and re-purpose them in new contexts — but calling a song “All I Ask Of You (Reprise)” just seems lazy. You think the audience wouldn’t figure it out?1 It’s RIGHT AFTER “All I Ask Of You”!
So, uh, here we go again with Individual Effort (Reprise). We’re hitting the same idea as we did two chapters ago; now we’re going to talk about how to do it during class.
To refresh: never confuse the teacher explaining with the student understanding. Students have to do the work themselves in order to learn. Your goal as the teacher is to facilitate this process in the form of constructing the environment that will help students achieve mastery.
You can best construct the environment in the class itself. You have to do some explanation during class — we hit that yesterday — but you’re also trying to foster individual effort and get the students to be the ones doing the work.
Let’s start with my absolute favorite teaching technique in the world.
Cold Calling
I don’t know what the actual current state of literature on cold calling is,2 nor do I know what modern pedagogy thinks about cold calling. I have a vague memory of hearing it trashed and discouraged in one of my certificate programs. I don’t remember the exact reason.
Maybe you remember being terrified that someone would call on you as a student — maybe you also had someone discourage you from doing this as a teacher. If they did, they were absolutely wrong, this technique gives you the most bang for your buck for encouraging individual effort of any technique I know of. It doesn’t have to be scary for anyone. Here’s what you do:
On the very first day, tell the students that you’re going to cold call. A lot. Explain why (see below). One useful point to make here is that the classroom is not the exam or summative assessment — we’re all here to learn. This is a tool to learn. It’s not intended to make students feel bad or ashamed. If we get questions wrong in class, that is the system working as intended! What it would it mean to never get things wrong in class? It would mean you’re in the wrong class, kiddo, or at the very least in the wrong seat, you should be up here teaching.
If we get things wrong in class, we don’t have to get them wrong on the exam later. Getting things wrong means we get to fix mistakes and confusion in the moment. Sucking at something is the first step to being good at something.When you cold call, say the student’s name. You always do this first. You never lead with the question and then call on someone because if they were zoned out they will not know what you asked. This puts the student in the very uncomfortable position of having to request clarification. Just don’t do that. Say the student’s name first, make eye contact, and then fire away.
Ask a question. There are a few reasons to cold call, some of which we mentioned yesterday:
You’re trying to jog their memory for some old piece of information that’s relevant to the new content.
You need to execute some simple calculation or setup and you’re tagging in a student to do it. It’s simple to joke about this one too: you’re far too important to do that work yourself, you already know the material, so get a student do it for you!
I like this one especially for doing calculator work on a physics problem — plug it into your own calculator just to make sure you know what the answer was supposed to be, but grab a student or two to do it as well.You want the student to complete the thinking / logic on a new concept that you’ve explained.
You want the student to take a stab at something new that’s a (straightforward) logical extension of what you just talked about.3
You’re having the students memorize something, so you ping them with that regardless of the context of the lesson.
This one is great — if you have any significant amount of memorization in your class, do this one a lot. When you’re solving a problem about something, just randomly cold call a student and say “wait refresh my memory — what the hell is a nitrate, again?”
If the student gets it right, don’t excessively praise them — it’ll make the contrast feel bad when students get it wrong. Just acknowledge, say “nice work”, and keep moving.
If the student gets it wrong, remember the rule of “Yes, and —”. Affirm whatever you can in their answer and try to help them pivot to the right answer.
If the student totally punts, be gentle — you can offer to have them “phone a friend” or “pick our next victim” and choose the next poor soul to answer the question.
When you’re cold calling, never ever ever shame a student for the wrong answer. Getting it wrong in front of their friends will be painful enough and the point isn’t to shame the students.
Cold calling works for two reasons:
It keeps students engaged! When students know they can be called on at any moment, they have a strong incentive to stay alert and attentive.
It fosters Individual Effort! Do not let students reach for their notes. The point isn’t to see if they can read their notes, any idiot can read their notes, the point is to put them in the drivers’ seat and have them be the one doing the work.
Mechanically, it’s useful to have some sort of randomizer to prevent you from gravitating towards the same students over and over again. I carry a d12 for my classes (or d20 as appropriate) and just roll on a table of student names.
Occasionally a student will come up twice in a row — this is both hilarious and good for engagement; you don’t want students to relax once you’ve called on them during a lesson. They could get pinged again, at any time. Sometimes I’ll even fake out students by saying something like
OK, I’m going to show you this stoichiometry calculation and then I’ll I give you one to do in your notes. We’ll cold call someone to see what they got. Maybe we’ll even cold call Hendricks.
Just kidding, Hendricks, we won’t call on you.
And then sometimes I’ll call on Hendricks and sometimes I won’t. Good times.
Try it next class — literally any time you want to recall an old fact or try a simple new skill out, cold call someone to help.
Modeling Problems
We talked yesterday about the basic sequence — Explain / Model / Practice. Modeling problems is when you work through a task on the board, explaining it to the students. Remember from yesterday that Chalk Talking problems is important — doing the explanation and work in real time helps stick to a good pace, and seeing the ideas and problem solving rolled out in logical order is a huge help to the students. This could be a kinematics problem or diagraming a sentence or a stoichiometry problem or whatever.
When modeling problems, it’s important to try to lay out the general strategy and approach you’re taking to the problem and to show them how to solve the problem the way you want them to solve it. You can show them multiple methods of attack if you want them to be aware of different possibilities.
Can you cold call while modeling a problem? Yes. Yes you can.
Any time you do a math step — grab a student to double check you with the calculator. Any time you do an algebra step — grab a student and ask them to help you figure out the next step to solve for your variable. Any time you’re doing a conversion — grab a student and see if they can help track down the information you need. Keep them engaged. You don’t want to work through a lengthy problem on the board, turn around five minutes later, and say “any questions?” There won’t be any — because they all zoned out four minutes ago.
Anything students can plausibly help with while working through a problem, cold call.
Board Work
The final step of the basic teaching sequence is Practice. Our room has a set of whiteboards on all of the walls. If you have this, or something similar, it’s great — use often. It’s good to get the students up to their feet, get them standing and moving and re-energized. I like playing some music in the background during board work. Depending on the mood, I might play something relaxing and instrumental and I might blast rock music if I can tell the class needs some energy.
If you don’t have this setup, you can also get students to work problems in their notes. Sometimes this is worth doing anyway so that students have the problems in their notes to look at later. It isn’t as good because there’s something helpful about the students getting up and being active, and it’s easier for students to hide or slack off, but milling around the room should help with that.
Whichever you do, you should give them a minute to start the process and then start milling around the room. Bring your coffee. Look over their shoulders. Ask them how it’s going, have them explain their work so far.
Remember the first mistake of every teacher: if they go off the rails, do not necessarily jump in and rescue them. It’s enough to say “Yeah you got off track there — look back over your work and try to find your mistake. Wave me over in a minute or two if you can’t spot it.” Resist the urge to re-teach the lesson and re-rack the weight until they’ve struggled with it for a bit.
There are many variations on the theme of having students do the work during class in a more substantive way than cold calling. Let me go through a few of them:
Think - Pair - Share: This is a tried and true technique. Have students begin by doing some work all by themselves, then pair them up. You can re-shuffle the class if you want to break up unruly pairs or even just have students see some new faces. Then, have them compare work and see if they got the same answer (and discuss if not). You may recognize this as similar to our MCQ formatting from a while back.
Paging Professor [Name]: This one is a little more advanced and can be scary for the students, but have them work out problems in their notes and then have someone (or a few people) come to the board and write their work out for group discussion. Students might feel very put on the spot, so make sure to emphasize that this is class, it doesn’t matter if the answer is right or not because wrong answers still lead to learning.4
There are other techniques that I don’t use, but might work in your class — Gallery Walks and Jigsaw are two that I have a vague memory of learning during my certificate programs. They didn’t click for me, but search them up and see what you think.
As you are having students do problems, discourage students flipping back to their notes when they get stuck. Always have them try the problem first — they might surprise themselves with what they are able to remember and work out.
That closes out the basic sequence — Explain / Model / Practice. During the first two, you should constantly be keeping the students engaged to the greatest extent possible. Cold call, cold call, cold call.
Tomorrow we’ll dive into the very contentious topic of equity when we talk about strategies for low performing students and we’ll close out the chapter.
Word Count: 41,765 / 50,000I’m an unabashed Hamilton Stan and I think Lin-Manuel Miranda does this really well. Hamilton repurposes its musical themes in more complicated ways. The motifs in “Wait For It”, “How Lucky We Are To Be Alive Right Now”, and “History Has Its Eyes On You” are reused in various points throughout the musical and it always feels interesting and never feels forced.
For example, the song "Unimaginable" re-borrows the motifs of "Look around, how lucky we are to be alive right now" and "that would be enough" in a new and beautifully sad context, but is otherwise completely disconnected from the rest of the musical in terms of style and content. This is very appropriate for a song about the devastating grief involved in losing a child and the desperate way Hamilton and Eliza come to love and rely on each other again in the aftermath.
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled teaching content.
and I don’t care
This one is great from a “testing what was never taught” standpoint, just make sure you keep it simple and respond to failure gently. I’ll sometimes direct students to “take a wild stab at it, I don’t care if it’s right” to emphasize that I want them to give it a shot but I’m not expecting them to execute it successfully yet.
We had the following hilarious exchange today:
Me: “OK Student X X, I’m gonna toss you the red marker, I want you to come up here and circle all the carbons on this skeletal structure.”
Student X: “Oh no, Dr. C, I’m not following this at all, can I phone a friend?”
Me: “Sure, pick our next victim.”
Student X: “I pick Student Y.”
Me: “Student Y, come on down.”
Student Y: “No sir, can’t do it, this didn’t gel for me.”
Me: “Guess what you two, I don’t care — looks like we’re back to you, Student X, why don’t you come up and give it a shot and we’ll give you a round of applause regardless of whether or not it’s right?”
Both students had it cold about ten minutes later. Student X later during the day asked if she could keep me as a teacher in the Spring since she loved the way I ran the class.