When should we give a name to something we do as teachers?
This question is on my mind this week following a post I wrote about adaptive teaching last week. I wrote the post because I keep coming across examples of people using the term to mean different things, sometimes quite unhelpfully. I was making the case for a narrow-ish definition of the term focused on the adaptive things teachers do during a lesson, rather than between lessons.
There was pushback on two fronts. Firstly, David Didau asked the sensible question in this post, ‘Isn’t adaptive teaching just teaching?’ It is a fair question. After all, to teach without taking feedback on whether pupils are taking anything from our teaching and then acting on this information is just ‘talking at children’, right? Then Adam Boxer raised an objection about the use of a ‘modifier’ in front of the word teaching, as if there are different types of teaching. Again, a fair point. I have made the same criticism of this tendency when applied to leadership; why do we need situational leadership, instructional leadership, or servant leadership? Answer: we probably don’t.
What we do need (I think) is to ramp up how adaptive many teachers are. If there is a point to using the term Adaptive Teaching, it is to draw attention to the importance of actively seeking information on how what you are doing is having an impact and what you could do differently to impact further. I suppose we could do this by saying to teachers ‘try to be more adaptive’. But they will legitimately ask ‘How?’, at which point we start to describe how. Whether we describe how teachers might be more adaptive or describe what we mean by Adaptive Teaching, the end result is the same.
Shortly thereafter, Adam tweeted this: ‘I make no apologies for being rejectionist when it comes to education terms that aren’t well defined. It’s why I don’t use terms like metacognition, adaptive teaching, responsive teaching, literacy, instructional coaching or cold call. Seen it go wrong too many times... they are so loosely defined as to mean different things to different people, and then go and do weird things in the name of the umbrella term.’ Adam then advocates descriptive terms such as ‘name at the end’ or ‘front load means of participation’.
Finally, we get another blog post from David (here) explaining why he has stopped using the term ‘cold call’, preferring instead to giving the things he prefers to do his own names, such as ‘attention checking’ and ‘sense making’. The point here is that the name given contains information about what the purpose is where as the term ‘cold call’ risks, David argues, people ‘talking past each other by using the same label but different definitions’.
Adam Boxer has previously justified his avoidance of the term in discourse with teachers on the basis that a) ‘some people are irrationally triggered by it’, b) it is misunderstood by people who think they do understand it, c) there are variations of cold call in TLAC ‘which makes it difficult to discuss and debate with people who haven’t read it’. In essence, Adam is highlighting the broadness of the term – the fact it conceptually contains lots of techniques. Might it be better if we used more specific terms which are more descriptive and less likely to be misinterpreted or variously defined?
All this raises the question, ‘When should we give a name to something teachers do?‘
Names are useful. Calling an octopus and octopus is helpful as we don’t have to keep describing the creature we are referring to (that sea creature with tentacles and suckers), but then most people only need a vague notion of what an octopus is and it is low-stakes if they mistake an octopus for something else, say a squid.
Names are useful for the things we do as well as the things that exist. If we tell someone we play darts it is sufficient information for someone to know that we throw pointy things at a round board to score points and win a game.
However, when you work within a specialist field, precision of language becomes much more important. It would not be acceptable for someone guiding a trainee-surgeon to use language which could be misinterpreted. Conceptual clarity is essential. For this reason, I am sympathetic to Adam and David’s rejectionist stance.
Before joining them in rejecting ‘cold call’, however, I wanted to go back and check my understanding of how Doug Lemov intended the term to be used. Like David, I have a copy of TLAC 1.0 but haven’t read it back-to-back. Here’s what I found.
Lemov (at least in this version) says Cold Call is when you ‘call on students regardless of whether they’ve raised their hands’. That’s it! I was quite surprised how broad this definition was. I read on.
Lemov goes on to give four reasons for cold calling: checking for understanding; promoting a culture of engaged accountability; increasing pace in instruction; and, securing a high ratio (of participation and ‘think ratio’). Interestingly, three purposes are related to pedagogies and one to learning culture.
He then sets out some rules for ensuring cold calling is executed with fidelity. These include:
- Keep cold calling predictable
- Make cold calling systematic (universal, even-toned, batched, evenly spread, and equitable)
- Keep cold calling positive (not used to catch out students e.g. ones who aren’t listening)
- Unbundle your cold calling (which is about multiple, precise questions to scaffold responses).
Lemov then describes variations (hands up/down, follow on/up, timing the name). Note that the last of these equates to what Adam called ‘name at the end’. We have to delve through four purposes, into four rules, and various variations until we get to the preciseness of Adam’s term.
Lastly, Lemov describes the opportunities for fine-tuning the technique, including length of pause, planned questions, and targeted questions.
To summarise, Lemov provides the following layers and nuance:
- A name (Cold Call)
- A description
- Reasons
- Rules
- Variations
- Fine tuning options
It appears to be true to say that the term ‘cold call’ could, and does, encapsulate a huge variety of practices. When a teacher claims to be using Cold Call, if they are using the term accurately, we know they mean that they are calling on students regardless of whether they have their hands up. But they could be doing that for a range of reasons and in a range of ways. If they have internalised Lemov’s rules, we can assume they are using this approach with fidelity. However, it would take considerable effort to apply Cold Call in the true spirit, within the rules set out, and with the flexibility and nuance described. On the one hand, it seems unreasonable (and optimistic) to hope that teachers will comprehend and remember all of this, let alone master Cold Calling. On the other hand, what Lemov sets out is a curriculum for helping teachers develop considerable skill. Perhaps, rather than limit our ambition, we should raise our game in the teaching profession and train teachers to execute questioning with the precision and intentionality that Lemov asks us to do. We would not accept any less of our surgeons.
So, whilst Adam might prefer precise, descriptive terms like ‘name at the end’, that does not lessen the amount of techniques, subtle variations, and potential for fine tuning required in the lexicon of pedagogies. The question is whether it is better to use a catch-all term like Cold Call and describe the variations and subtleties within, or whether to name each specific habit, technique, or behaviour without over-arching terminology.
There is also a question of how precise we become. Take David’s preferred terminology of ‘sensemaking’ as an example. What I like about David’s focus on this is that it focusses the teacher on whether students are making sense of what they are being taught now, rather than whether they understand what has been taught previously. David’s concept appears to draw on Ausubel’s Assimilation Theory: the process of connecting new information to existing knowledge. What David appears to be concerned about is whether students are assimilating what he teaches them into their schema in a way that makes sense of this new information, or makes meaning. This contrasts to Lemov’s less precise ‘checking for understanding’ which could refer to checking on past learning or current assimilation.
However, why not go further and name a questioning approach that seeks to uncover exactly what kind of assimilation is taking place? We could be checking for progressive differentiation, subordinate learning, or integrative reconciliation (see this post for more information). Why not name these specifically – ‘checking for integrative reconciliation’, and so on?
I think the answer to this slightly facetious question is not about whether there is a preferable level of granularity, but about what we want to shine a light on. What is it we think it is important and worth giving name to? For David, whether students are paying attention and making sense of what he is teaching is important to him. To Adam, whether you put the student’s name before or after the question is important to him.
What is important to Doug Lemov? The clue, I think, is in that simple description of cold calling: ‘call on students regardless of whether they’ve raised their hands’. The active ingredient of cold calling is to break the habit of only asking children who raise their hands to answer a question. Lemov has given name to the thing that he believes is most important for most teachers in becoming more effective. Yes, there is much more to it, but if nothing else, break this link. Once you have broken this link, perhaps you’ll be ready to get more granular.
In so many classrooms I visit, this link is yet to be broken. For this reason, the term ‘cold call’ continues to have power, even if it means nothing more to teachers than the top-level definition.
There is one more reason I will continue to use the term. Whilst we, as individuals, have the luxury of choosing what to call different aspects of our practice as per our interests and preferences, the system as a whole suffers if we all exercise this right freely. Whilst I accept that we should work hard to avoid using the same terms to mean different things, we should also work hard to secure a common language whereby we broadly are using the same words to mean the same thing. The fact is that Cold Call is in common use in English schools and I’d rather put effort into developing a shared understanding than to throw it out and start again.
And that is why I am still using ‘cold call’. First, I want teachers to do it, then to do it well, then to develop mastery. We can exercise our right to adopt our own naming conventions and to argue for better naming conventions, but we should not make the drive for perfection be the enemy of system progress.
Matthew Evans 