“Anyone else?” Let’s stop calling on volunteers

“Does anyone besides Angel, Akeem, and Isabel want to answer?”

Statements like these echo in classrooms across the country, as a handful of the same students frantically wave their hands to answer questions, while everyone else is checked out.  Teachers get frustrated at the lack of engagement, practically begging anyone else to jump in. 

Students get frustrated too.  Students with their hands up are annoyed that they don’t get called on.  And for students without a raised hand, they get flustered if they called on when they clearly were trying to avoid producing a response out loud. 

When I observe classrooms, from kindergarten through 12th grade in all kinds of settings, there’s a huge difference in student engagement and evidence of student learning depending on the type of strategies teachers use to engage students in discussion.  

For those who use a volunteer system by offering up a question or a prompt and asking for raised hands in response, I often see the scenario above play out: just a handful of students raising hands and producing responses.  In these classrooms I see between 5 - 20% of students engaging during the discussion time. 

However, in classrooms where teachers either use a random name generator (virtual or popsicle sticks in a can) to call on students or ask students to all produce a response simultaneously, engagement jumps dramatically.  In these situations, I typically see between 80 - 100% of students engaging during the discussion.  

Because of this dramatic difference, calling on volunteers only was becoming some of a pet peeve of mine as a coach.

Then, this spring, my daughter told me that she was tired of her teacher saying things like the statement above. (She’s one of the frantic handwavers.)  And that pushed me over the edge. 

I now encourage teachers and school leaders to commit to change this practice.  

Let’s ban calling on volunteers as a regular classroom practice. 

Having a clear boundary for classroom discussion practices pushes us to drop the comfortable zone of calling on volunteers, an ineffective tool used for decades in our education system, into the wide world of researched and tested strategies for engaging all students simultaneously. 

I’ll share some ideas for highly engaging classroom discussion strategies in a future post. For now, I’m curious about how giving yourself the limitation of stopping calling on volunteers might push your creativity in the classroom. 

If you banned the use of calling on student volunteers in your classroom, how do (or would) you engage students more effectively in classroom discussion? 

Comment below.