Better Questions, Better Learning: Moving Beyond Hands Up

The Question

Picture the scene. I ask a question, the same three hands go up, I pick one, they get it right, and I move on feeling like the lesson is going well.

Early in my career I noticed something very quickly. Whether a pupil is confident in the subject or just confident in general, they will be the ones with their hands up. On the surface that looks fantastic. It is far from the truth. Look around the room and 80% plus are twiddling their thumbs, letting the lesson pass them by. Thankfully I had some amazing mentors. In my training and NQT year I was blessed to work with two fantastic practitioners who favoured active learning and were, I daresay, ahead of their time.

The problem isn’t the pupils who put their hands up. It’s everyone else. (Last week I wrote about mistaking willingness to answer for evidence of learning. Consider this the practical follow up!)

Questioning matters in every part of a lesson, but it does its most important work in the We Do, when the class rehearses before anyone works alone. So my question for this Toolkit post: how do we get EVERY pupil thinking when we ask a question, not just the ones with their hands up?

The Thinking

Tom Sherrington and Oliver Caviglioli’s Teaching WalkThrus breaks classroom techniques down into five step guides, and its questioning section is where I’d send any teacher who wants to get this right. Their cold calling walkthrough starts with a simple norm: no hands up, no calling out, and the question goes to everyone before anyone is chosen. The point is to make every pupil feel the question is for them, because one pupil’s right answer tells you nothing about what the other twenty nine were thinking.

I first came across WalkThrus in 2021, not long after it came out, in my first whole school leadership role, leading coaching. We used it to give our coaching cycles real direction. After a learning walk we could point a teacher to the sections that matched what we’d seen, talk the techniques through, then put the ball firmly in their court to try what resonated with them. I’ve used WalkThrus in my own leadership and my own practice ever since, up to volume 3, and I still go back to the questioning section whenever I feel myself slipping into old habits.

Mary Budd Rowe looked at the other half of the problem: time. She found teachers typically waited around a second before taking an answer or answering it themselves. When they stretched that to three seconds or more, pupils gave longer answers, more of them responded and fewer said “I don’t know”. A second is long enough for the quickest pupil in the room. It isn’t long enough for anyone else.

Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 3.0 adds the culture that makes it work. His Cold Call is meant to feel warm and routine, and his No Opt Out means “I don’t know” is the start of the conversation, not the end of it.

The common trap is treating cold calling as the whole strategy. Without think time it simply moves the pressure: the pupils not picked switch off, and the one who is picked can freeze.

The Redraft

Here’s the routine in five steps. The model below follows one question that works in any subject: two short answers side by side, and the class decides which is stronger and why. Tap through it, then read each step in full underneath. Swap in your own content as you read; the steps don’t change.

1. Ask everyone first. Make no hands up the normal routine and tell the class why: I want to hear from everyone, so I’ll choose who answers. Then ask the whole room before you say a name. Say the name first and everyone else relaxes.
2. Give real think time. Count it silently in your head. Three seconds is the minimum Rowe found made a difference, and harder questions need more: spotting the error in a worked solution needs far longer than recalling a date. Give pupils something to do with the time, like jotting one reason on a mini whiteboard, so thinking time doesn’t turn into waiting time.
3. Rehearse in pairs. Before anyone speaks to the room, every pupil says their answer to a partner. It’s quick, it’s low stakes, and nobody is cold called on a thought they haven’t put into words yet. Keep it tight: a time limit and a clear instruction about who speaks first.
4. Cold call warmly. Now choose several pupils from around the room, in a warm, matter of fact tone. If a pupil says “I don’t know”, ask what their partner said, so they still finish the thinking. Push good answers further too: “Say it again, and this time use the word evidence.”
5. Check the whole room. Cold calling tells you about a few pupils. Mini whiteboards tell you about ALL of them. Everyone shows at the same time, you scan the room and decide your next move there and then. If the room is split, ask a pupil who chose B to talk the class through their reasoning, then everyone shows again.

I check for understanding in every part of my teaching, but I lean on whole class feedback most heavily in the We Do. It’s the rehearsal phase of the lesson. It can build a real competitive edge, it brings misconceptions out into the open, and it gives me the information (and the validation!) I need before moving to the You Do.

And some honest notes on what to watch out for, because this didn’t all work first time.

Early in my career, in a school that hadn’t yet built shared norms for teaching and learning, I was teaching half-life. I had broken down how a radioactive sample decays over time using the graph, then moved to my “speak to your partner”. That’s where it fell down. I hadn’t established the routine, I barely explained it, and the class had never seen it in other lessons. Some pairs waffled on and drifted away from the question; others sat in complete silence, not buying into it at all. I panicked and, of course, went straight back to hands up, picking my most confident pupils. “At least they’ll know it and we can move on.” (Exactly the habit this post is about!)

• Teach the routine before you need it. Who speaks first, for how long, and what to say. Practise it on an easy question first.
• Silence feels far longer to the teacher than to the pupils. The temptation is to fill it or rephrase, which restarts everyone’s thinking. Count it and hold your nerve.

The Reflection

The part I’m still thinking about is the pupil who finds being asked genuinely difficult, whether that’s anxiety, confidence or language. Earlier in my career I would have taken the easy way out and let them opt out. As I developed, I realised I was doing those pupils a disservice. So instead, while roaming the room for live marking, I would tactically approach anxious pupils and ask them one to one, without exposing them in front of the class. It worked much better. Some still found it difficult and preferred to write their answer down. Ultimately it comes down to knowing your class in great detail and using that to your advantage. One technique I’ve borrowed from primary colleagues is the well worn path: a route around the room planned into the seating plan, so I reach the pupils who need me without making a show of it.

This week, run one We Do question through all five steps and see what the boards tell you that the hands never did.

So here’s my current draft: every pupil thinks, some pupils answer, every pupil shows. I’ve no doubt I’ll redraft it.

Take what’s useful, change what isn’t, and let me know how it goes. How would you adapt these five steps for your own classes, and which question will you try them on first?

Every lesson is a draft. Share what you’d redraft in the comments.