Cold Call and Teacher Roleplay

The current pedagogic fashion while running a teacher led discussion is to use the technique from ‘Teach Like a Champion’ called cold call. During this, the teacher poses the question that they are going to ask, waits a while and then nominates a specific person to answer it. The idea is that, as the students don’t know who the question will go to, every child has to think of an answer to it, and there will be no one zoned out as, plausibly, they will be called on to provide and answer at some point. Consequently, we won’t have the same faces dominating every lesson, and all children will have to think which will cause the whole class to develop cognitively. There are sensible people who regard it as being a contribution to democratising learning. It is, like a lot of the techniques in ‘Teach Like a Champion’ entirely convincing on a theoretical level, and I’ve used it myself. Not for long.

I had two year eleven classes a couple of years ago and tried it out on them. It went OK with the slightly lower attaining class, and it did make Sabrina, who would usually remain quiet in lessons, contribute, but the higher attaining of the two classes asked me to stop using it within two days of introducing it. They felt it to be inauthentic and preferred to go back to way I’d been running things previously. They wanted the class to return to what Niall referred to as the “informal formality” of the more organic ways of running a class discussion. You might reasonably suggest that, as a novice, I wasn’t very good at it, and I’d happily acknowledge that to be the case, but doubts hung around.

In 2023, I read the book that contained the technique and noted that many of the techniques were titled with imperatives such as “Standardize the Format.”[1][2]”[3] I read sociolinguist, Ian Cushing’s, paper, ‘Language, Discipline and Teaching Like a Champion’, in which he claims that he is seeking to “explore how the disciplining of language correlates with the disciplining of the body”.[4]  It is worth acknowledging, first, that the names that we give things can be where authoritarianism starts.[5] Cold call was taken by Doug from Harvard Business School. It is a technique sourced from the business world. And this technique for teaching human children is titled by something that comes from direct marketing. I noted wryly that it is perhaps likely to result in the technique being as unwanted by the children as a cold call from a call centre generally is to an adult. Cushing points out that the language of TLAC is “characterised by hostile sport and business metaphors (e.g. ‘high-performance’; ‘cold call’; ‘transaction cost’; ‘on your marks’; ‘strategic investment’; ‘hurdle rate’).”[6]

It is often employed in tandem with another technique with a worrying title, “No Opt-out”, in which you don’t accept a child saying that they don’t have the answer to the question that has been pointed directly at them. This always seemed to me to be at best quite a problematic idea. There is an Orwellian slant[7] to calling techniques to be used to teach children “No Opt-out” and, as another is called, “Right is Right.”[8] I’ve seen no opt-out used in classes in the United Kingdom by inexperienced teachers, and the effect can be that the poor student who doesn’t know the answer is left suppurating in a well of shame as the teacher bullies a child for an answer they do not have.

Lemov is good enough to provide ways out of this potential stand-off for the students and for the teacher, but the best way out of it is probably not to bully children into answering a question they do not know the answer to in the first place. There is an option for the student: rather than suffer shame as the teacher insists that they answer a question they can’t answer, they might have reason to tell the teacher placing them into a position where they are being publicly humiliated to “p*** off” and, following this, to storm out of the classroom. Align this technique with punitive ‘zero-tolerance’ discipline, and you’re going to create a whole hill of problems as you’ve potentially got children squirming in shame with no way out of an adult bullying them. What if you do this, and the child is having an awesomely difficult home life? What if his parents are divorcing? What if he’s ill, anxious, nervous, has special needs, is new to the language, has issues with authority figures, is prone to transference? Teachers who really know what they are doing do not behave like this. We speak softly to children and, if they don’t fancy answering that day, well, we’ll leave it till tomorrow. It might be they were having a bad day. Humans are allowed bad days and, despite the assertions of the inexperienced, it really is all about relationships.

If we go to the videos showing how one might perform ‘no opt-out’, there is an example of a young person corrected in the act of public reading. There are ideas and opinions as to whether teachers should be making slower readers read in public, and I tend towards thinking, like all instances of placing other human beings in a position where they might experience shame, it’s probably not a good idea. But this is just my opinion. The child falters at the correction and is clearly a bit embarrassed to be put in such a position. There is evidence of the public shaming of students inherent in the application of some of these techniques in the exemplar materials they use. Still, in Doug’s view of the world of the classroom, it is better that students are shamed than teachers set, what Lemov describes, in a sentence that is surely – how can it possibly not be? – a winking piece of self-satire, “a low standard for correctness”.[9]

Towards my end of my time at my last school, I sat with two students in my bottom set year elevens. They clearly wanted to talk and seemed to know that my friend P and I were leaving before the school had informed us.[10] Geoffrey was a student in care who had a reputation for recalcitrance, but I always found him charming (I had taught his sister before, and perhaps this helped); Steven told me in our first lesson together that I was “a sh** teacher.” I’d replied that it was a probably a bit early to make that judgement. 

Many months later, when Steven had acknowledged that his initial review of my abilities had been a bit hasty perhaps, I asked them what they thought of the mainstream pedagogic offer as I’m interested in what children think about the education they receive. I was specifically interested in what they thought of cold call. Geoff’s hackles rose, “We hate it. It’s just bullying. You are always on edge as you think it’s you that’s going to be picked on, and you’ll look stupid in front of the rest of the class. It’s humiliating.”

I’ve also sat in staff training sessions in which cold call was used and learned a bit about the emotional impact of it and the quality of answers it can elicit. You are in a public, social setting with colleagues, some of whom have the power to end your employment if you do not at least tacitly endorse what they’re proposing you do in classroom (even when you profoundly disagree with it), and you’re being taught about teaching by a member of SMT who’s been doing it for over twenty years less than you who seems not to have read the book containing all the stuff that he/she’s ‘teaching’ you. He/she presents a technique that you have concluded, after much study and detailed consideration, to be borderline abusive. He/she then cold calls you, asking you to share what you think about that technique. 

You need to keep your job. You consider saying what you really think: that it is unthinking, authoritarian, tautological nonsense. If you say what you think, you may lose your home, so you come out with some bland, phatic answer. You lie basically. As you are doing so, you briefly recall Vaclav Havel’s statement that humans have a fundamental desire to live “within truth”[11] and you note that you are experiencing cognitive dissonance. The SMT member is satisfied with your useless answer. He/she is pleased that he/she has taught you something and that cold call has worked so well on you. But it hasn’t worked. It’s made you lie. It’s made you give a shallow answer that was accepted as being your truth. 

Cold call places students (and teachers) into a realm where a shallow and unthought out answer is accepted and encouraged, and students or teachers will generally willingly give such an answer as it gets the boss off your back. My contention is that it feels psychologically unsafe for some people, specifically for those who disagree with prevailing orthodoxies. Cold call can be hugely uncomfortable for some people as environments in which the shallow answer is promoted as truth are environments in which truth itself is less valued than it should be. 

Following being cold called, you are forced to compulsorily humiliate yourself by performing in an utter farce of a role play your trainer calls deliberate practice. You consider pointing out that you cannot deliberately practice in completely hypothetical scenarios but realise you will be sacked or told off if you do so. You try and take the role play seriously, but you cannot because it transforms you into a jackanapes and you are learning less than nothing from it. You are then required to provide compulsory positive feedback as to how very beneficial the techniques you have been taught will be and when you will use them. But you will not ever use them. You are cold called for your compulsory positive feedback. You shudder with empathy for the poor children who are being told that this gruel is to sole acceptable method of teaching and who are subjected to its clutching suffocation on a daily, lesson-by-lesson basis.

 

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 [1] Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College p59.

[2] To which one might be tempted to respond, “No, you standardise the format. I’m not in the mood today.

[3] “Plan for Error.” Nope, sorry, not in the mood for that either.

[4] Ian Cushing, Language, Discipline and ‘Teaching Like a Champion’, British Educational Research Journal 47/1 (Feb 2021) p23.

[5] Michela, Murgia, How to be a Fascist: A Manual (Pushkin Press: London, 2018) p14.

[6] Ian Cushing, Language, Discipline and ‘Teaching Like a Champion’, British Educational Research Journal 47/1 (Feb 2021)

[7] See what I did there?

[8] Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College p87.

[9] Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College p101.

[10] “We know you and Mr. K. will be leaving because you don’t teach like everyone else.”

[11] Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Crimes Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe (M. E. Sharpe: Armonk, 1985) p21.