“Cold calling is psychologically damaging to students”. Discuss.

 

Image source: MS PowerPoint

In my travels around schools and conversations with teachers and leaders, it is common to be discussing the whys and wherefores of a pedagogical shift to explicit teaching. It’s worth noting, I think, just what a seismic shift this is for many, and how much it challenges some deeply helped beliefs and equally deeply-embedded practices. It is hard for humans to change their behaviour (I’m looking at you, weight loss, exercise, diet, alcohol consumption, smoking, driving habits, spending patterns, …. the list goes on). If it was easy, we would all flick a metaphorical switch as soon as we felt the case had been made for change. Click! Old behaviour eradicated; new behaviour established.

But changing behaviour is not easy, and this applies no less to the adoption of a classroom practice like cold-calling than it does to any other established behaviour. Sometimes we don’t want to change our behaviour because we know that it will involve learning new knowledge and skills – i.e. it will be challenging and time-consuming and we may not be very good at it initially.

Sometimes teachers are reluctant to adopt new practices because changing pedagogical routines is difficult, and the motivation to do so is low when the new practices do not align with teachers’ beliefs about student learning and wellbeing, and what these should look like in the classroom.

The adoption of cold-calling is a case in point. Some teachers are horrified when they first encounter this practice and adopt a stance of needing to defend their current practices and believe they need to protect their students from what they see as sure-fire psychological harms.

Sometimes one concern is used as a fig-leaf, to conceal another.

Before looking at responding to these concerns, let’s unpack what cold calling is.

Cold calling is the only way to truly ensure inclusion of all students in the classroom learning they got out of bed and turned up for. It occurs as part of the well-paced teach-first-and-check-for-understanding formative assessment cycle that is central to explicit teaching and involves the following core elements:

1.      Teachers socialise students into the process – they explain that in this class, I will teach first, and then I will call on you all, randomly, at different times, to check in quickly, in a low-stakes way, on your learning. This helps me to see how the learning is going and tells me when I need to teach something again.

2.      Teachers explain that they will not be calling on students in an effort to catch them out on either not paying attention or not knowing an answer. They are calling on them to create opportunities for them to contribute equitably in their learning environment.

3.      Cold calling is always done to provide opportunities to contribute and to be heard in the classroom.

4.      Paradoxically, teachers cold call with warmth. They pose a question about something they have taught and then retrieve a pop-stick or similar with a student’s name on it, make eye-contact with the student, and invite them to respond.

5.      Teachers use their knowledge of individual students to titrate (differentiate) their expectations, e.g., by waiting a little longer for some students, by providing a prompt, or by asking a little extra of more able students.

6.      Once a student has been called, they see their name go “back in the draw” which means they are motivated to remain focused and attentive. They are not “one and done”. This is good for shared attention and enables the teacher to lift the pace, as they become more familiar with the cycle of teaching first and checking for understanding in tandem.

7.      If a student responds with some form of “I don’t know”, they are encouraged to listen to other students’ responses, before the teacher loops back to them (which they know about in advance) to give them another opportunity to show their learning, sometimes in small, incremental steps.

8.      “I don’t know” and incorrect responses are real-time, invaluable (formative) feedback to teachers that their explanations or examples may not have been as clear as they had hoped, and some on-the-spot re-teaching is needed. Sometimes too, there are surprises for teachers regarding students' responses - more able students who are not up to speed and less able ones who are travelling better than expected.

 

Above all, cold-calling is done to foster a climate of safety and trust in the classroom, because of its patterned routines and the way it normalises contributions from all students across the ability spectrum. It in fact gives the quieter, more reticent students a voice in the classroom that they may not otherwise have.

Cold-calling by-passes the natural human tendency for students (and adults) to say they understand something when in fact they don’t, or they have only a partial understanding. We have all indicated “yes” to some version of “Does that make sense?” (usually asked with a hopeful nod) when it makes little or no sense at all, but we erroneously believe that we are the only ones in the room who “don’t get it”, so we nod back. This is not what learning looks like.

It’s true that some students are more anxious about speaking in class than are others, but it’s also true that we overcome situations and experiences that make us anxious by walking towards them, not by avoiding them – this is a central tenet of exposure activities in cognitive behaviour therapy. The longer we don’t do that thing that makes us anxious, the more anxiety-provoking it becomes. On the other hand, nothing succeeds like success, and success that is experienced in a safe, warm learning environment reduces anxiety and builds students’ self-efficacy for learning.

Let’s look at this from the perspective of our “less able” students and/or those who are reluctant to speak in class for any range of reasons. What messages do they receive from being in classrooms with only hands-up practices? They learn that

·         People who get to speak in this classroom are the ones who are confident, quick, and smart.

·         I’m not confident, quick and smart, so speaking in class is not for me. It’s a party I don’t get invited to.

·         I’m the spectator, while others participate.

·         Other students have the opportunity to show their knowledge and receive feedback, but I don’t.

·         It’s fine for my mind to wander or for me to distract others, because I’m not in the learning dress-circle.

·         I can go through the whole school day without ever responding in class, because no one expects that of me.

·         The teacher doesn't know what I’m understanding or not understanding, because I’m not asked to respond.

·         I’m neurodiverse / from another language background, so putting my hand up will be embarrassing. Best to stay quiet.

·         My peers get to practise becoming confident at public speaking, but I don’t.

·         I’ll possibly never develop skills in public speaking, even though it’s part of the curriculum.

·         Things that are challenging are best avoided.

 

Is cold-calling psychologically harmful to students?

Whether or not any teaching practice is psychologically harmful is largely a question of how it is used by the teacher. Calling the attendance roll can be done in a psychologically harmful way if we so choose. If there’s any evidence that when cold calling

Ø  is used by teachers who understand its rationale and teach first,  

Ø  know their students,

Ø  engage warmly, and

Ø  have opportunities to discuss this new skill with peers and/or a coach

….. and psychological harm accrues, I would be at the front of the queue to read it.

Cold calling is used in the name of inclusion and learning to promote academic success, student wellbeing, and a positive classroom climate.

 

Additional resources on using cold calling well in classrooms:

Cold Calling: The #1 strategy for inclusive classrooms - Tom Sherrington

Cold Calling Explained – Jamie Clark Teaching One-Pagers

Cold Call is Inclusive – Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion

'Cold calling' builds better classrooms for kids with language difficulties – by Eamon Charles

Five Tips for ‘Cold Calling’ in the classroom - Kate Jones.

Videos resources about cold calling

Doug Lemov - What is Cold-Calling?

Tom Sherrington - Kitchen Pedagogy: Cold Call Variations

EL Education Kids Like Cold Call and No Opt Out

 

© Pamela Snow (2025)

2025 minus 2005 equals 20 years of lost progress

 

Image source: MS PowerPoint

If you’re not too young to do so, cast your mind back to 2005. 

What were you doing? Where were you living? 

In 2005, my family and I had been living in Bendigo for four years and I had spent the previous seven years cutting my teeth on some serious new (for me) knowledge in the field of public health. This knowledge was pivotal in forcing me to think about language and literacy at a population level, not just at the level of individuals and their assessment profiles. I wasn’t the only one doing so. More on that in a moment.

First up, perhaps you remember some of these 2005 world events?

·         Hurricane Katrina

·         The launch of YouTube

·         The then Prince Charles marrying Camilla Parker Bowles

·         The maiden flight of Boeing’s Airbus A380

·         The legalisation of same-sex marriage in Canada

….to name a few. It feels like 2005 was a long time ago, doesn't it? That’s because it was.

2025 marks two decades since a near-miss significant event in the life of Australian children: the publication of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (NITL). Readers of The Snow Report are likely to be familiar with the fact that this publication appeared five years after the report of the US National Reading Panel and one year before the publication of the so-called Rose Report in England. The defining feature of these three documents, at the dawn of a new millennium, was that they drew on available scientific evidence to synthesise recommendations for policy-makers, school leaders, and classroom teachers on how to most effectively teach children to read - at scale. The NITL also drew on extensive school-based consultations and input from a reference group comprising stakeholders from 24 peak bodies with expertise in, or relevant to education. So far, so good.

Language and terminology varied slightly between these reports, but they all recommended that children in English-speaking jurisdictions be exposed to instruction that is delivered by knowledgeable teachers, in a structured and explicit way, building from code knowledge to the ability to process and derive meaning from increasingly complex unfamiliar text.

The NITL report stated that:

"Findings from the research evidence indicate that all students learn best when teachers adopt an integrated approach to reading that explicitly teaches phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary knowledge, and comprehension."

Note that the report did recommend integration of these essential elements, but it did not recommend something called “balanced literacy” (BL) as the means of doing so; selective quote-mining by BL devotees in the years since has sometimes been allowed to create this impression, but it is a falsehood.

The 20 recommendations arising from this report were largely met with a deafening silence in Australian education jurisdictions – or perhaps more accurately, with a collective “la la la, we can’t hear you”. The report probably didn’t even find its way into many university libraries and I’m pretty sure it did not grace the lecture theatres or tutorial rooms attended by pre-service teachers, whose lecturers patiently waited for the evidence bad weather event to pass.

The 2005 NITL report was commissioned by the Hon Dr. Brendan Nelson, then Minister for Education, Science, and Training, and following its release, he expressed concerns about the effectiveness of mainstream classroom teaching methods in literacy education. He further emphasised the importance of early identification and intervention for students with learning difficulties, highlighting the need for teachers to be equipped with the necessary skills to recognise and address these challenges effectively.

Imagine for a moment, that around this time, there was a national report signposting ways to reduce rates of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS, formerly known as “cot death”) and that the recommendations of this report were adopted and translated into changed practice by health professionals in all states and territories.

Well funnily enough, such a report was published by Henderson-Smart et al., in 1998, building on work commenced in the preceding decade, and, as readers will know, its recommendations were adopted, and (drum-roll)…..SIDS rates have dropped dramatically ever since.

If you’ve ever wondered what a dramatic response to an evidence-based shift in public policy looks like, look no further than the graph below:

Image source

Of course, the unexpected loss of beautiful, healthy and cherished babies has a tragic and confronting immediacy that lends itself to galvanised and united action and we should rightly celebrate these wins. My own children were born in 1988 and 1989 and like most people at that time, I knew people whose lives had been devastated by SIDS. I am grateful that SIDS has not been a sinister shadow over my daughters’ early parenting years.

Had policy-makers, health professionals and the media placed ideology over evidence, taking a “balanced” approach to supporting “a range of practices”, many healthy young adults born from the 1990s onwards (many of them now classroom teachers no doubt) simply would not be with us today – such is the power of evidence-based policy and practice.

We are fortunate in Australia, to be able to apply evidence in this way, but evidence is not a luxury commodity with peculiar relevance only to fields such as medicine, public health, and engineering. It is also available and relevant to education, but academics and policy-makers in that field have adopted a “buffet” approach to research evidence, selecting familiar sweet, tasty morsels here and there and rejecting offerings that they do not recognise or understand. I don’t recall the nurses’ union making silly and embarrassing public statements that providing evidence-based guidelines to new parents on SIDS prevention would “de-professionalise” maternal and child health nurses and was disrespectful of their autonomy and expertise. Professionals understand that autonomy and accountability go hand-in-hand and if the community is forced to chose one over the other, it will opt for accountability every time.

Where might we have been, two decades on, in 2025, had our education leaders followed the lead of their health counterparts and taken action on behalf of our children after the 2005 NITL report?

• We might have NAPLAN data that is not flat-lining and concealing significant gaps for students in so-called equity and diversity groups.
• We might have teachers who are knowledgeable about how their writing and spelling system works and not having to pay for this in their own time, sometimes after years of frustration and low impact in the classroom.
• We might not have substantial numbers of students entering secondary school with literacy and/or numeracy skills three or more years below those of their peers.  

The concerns articulated by the Hon Brendan Nelson back in 2005 have been echoed in countless subsequent reviews, inquiries and reports, most notably in the 2023 Teacher Education Expert Panel Report (for link and my commentary, see here). Let’s remember too, that fewer than one in five children who are behind in Grade 3 catch up and stay on level. As Dr. Anita Archer reminds us, we can't intervene our way out of Tier 1 problems. 

It's taken two decades for us to stop spinning the wheels in reading instruction in Australia, but that’s two decades we can’t have back. That’s tens of thousands of children who have spent thirteen years at school in a wealthy, industrialised nation, only to exit semi-literate. If evidence about reducing SIDS had been wilfully withheld from professionals and parents, it would be front-page news. The evidence free-pass for education needs to be retired. I've written previously about the fact that where change is happening, it's typically driven by classroom teachers; education academics need to come down from the upper levels of the forest canopy and listen to these practice experts on the forest floor.

Twenty years on from our NITL Report, many education policy-makers and academics, school leaders, and (I would argue, to a lesser extent) classroom teachers are still indulging the buffet approach to evidence. This is evidenced by school leaders asking their staff questions like "What's the bare minimum we need to do to comply with the phonics mandate?". They are urged to reflect on evidence wins in other fields and ask how their own humility can contribute to better lives for the children they serve. Children’s instructional time is not ours to waste.

I hope that commentators in another 20 years’ time will be reporting on transformed respect for evidence, meaningful knowledge translation, and most importantly, dramatic data shifts that show that we value children’s futures as much as their lives.  

© Pamela Snow (2025)