Mr B’s students have just completed an exercise where they were stating and explaining the properties of solids, liquids and gases. Mr B was writing answers on the board, and Steph had just given him one of the properties of solids – that they cannot be compressed. He then asked:

“great, can I have another property of solids…Danny?”

“I wrote that liquids can flow”

“sorry Danny, I’m looking for another property of a solid. Steph told us that they can’t be compressed, can you give me another?”

“oh yeah, they don’t flow.”

***

As in previous blogs, we start with the good:

  • Mr B’s question to Danny was delivered by Cold Call, building Ratio
  • Mr B gave Danny Wait Time, building Ratio
  • Mr B diverted Danny’s unexpected answers: sometimes teachers will run with the unexpected response, and then only come back to the original thread (i.e. the properties of a solid) later. This can make the lesson feel quite disjointed and difficult for students to follow, so it’s good that Mr B diverted back to his original question flow.

In terms of the questioning, not bad. But the issue arises when Mr B got the unexpected answer, and it shows that Mr B is missing out on a crucial piece of teacher-knowledge.

To get to the heart of the matter, let’s look at another scenario:

Mr A is reviewing work from a previous lesson on states of matter. He asks:

“What is the name for the process of a solid turning to a liquid…Charlie?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, before reading on test yourself by trying to remember what Mr A should do next. No cheating!

In a previous post, we established that if a student says they don’t know, it could be because they genuinely don’t know (which requires one set of responses) or because they weren’t listening (which requires a different set of responses). We said there that the best response to Charlie would be asking him to repeat the question. If he can repeat it then we are more confident he doesn’t know or understand the content. If he can’t repeat it, then he probably wasn’t paying attention.

A similar scenario looks like this:

Mr A is reviewing work from a previous lesson on states of matter. He asks:

“What is the name for the process of a solid turning to a liquid…Charlie?”

“Can you repeat the question, sir?”

In this case, we know for sure he wasn’t listening. No follow-up “what question did I ask” is needed, because his answer tells us that he wasn’t listening. It’s an observable phenomenon that gives us clear and unambiguous information about what students are or aren’t thinking about. Their answer transmits crucial information, and Mr A needs to be alert to that.

Let’s go back to Danny and the unexpected answer he gave Mr B. I see this happen a lot. The teacher is doing some questioning, and a student says something that is part of the topic or lesson as a whole, but not directly related to what the teacher just said. It’s unexpected, and teachers normally deal with it either by going along with it or by diverting back to what the teacher originally asked about (which is what Mr B did). To my mind, both of these responses are wrong, because they aren’t alert to the information being conveyed, which in this case is that Danny isn’t properly attending to that part of the lesson. If he had been paying full attention to that part of the lesson, he would have answered the question. After all, he knew the answer. The fact he didn’t give the answer at the first time of asking tells us pretty clearly that he wasn’t paying attention to Mr B’s question flow.

That doesn’t mean this lack of attention is Danny’s fault. The case of Mr B happened in a lesson I observed, and whilst the teacher was getting these responses about properties of solids, liquids and gases they were also writing voluminous notes on the board and asking students to mark their work. The students were dutifully looking at the board and seeing if it matched what they wrote, and then adding bits and pieces to their answers based on what they saw. Of course, students aren’t superhuman and whilst they were focused on that board-to-book task, they weren’t listening to Mr B. When Mr B asked Danny the question, Danny had been focused on checking his previous answers, not on what Mr B or Steph was saying. Danny then made a mental assumption about what question had been asked, and answered that one instead.

When I observe lessons and see stuff like this happen, I use the hypothesis model to test it: I predict that other students aren’t listening or aren’t engaged with the flow of the lesson as directed by the teacher, and I just go to a few of them and say things like “what did Danny just say?” or “what did Mr B just say?” Nine times out of ten, they either say they don’t know, tell me unrelated nonsense or they tell me something that was said ten minutes ago.

In all these lessons, there is information being conveyed: that the way the teacher is running the questioning isn’t including all students – i.e. Ratio is low. In our case, Mr B is not alert to this message; he doesn’t realise that Danny’s unexpected answer shouldn’t just be diverted, but requires a different response.

If he had have been alert, he might have tried something like this:

[thinks internally] Ah, it sounds like Danny isn’t following the thread of the lesson. There are probably other students like that too so I’ll just quickly look around the room…oh yeah ok there are loads of them writing stuff down and clearly not listening to me.

“ok guys can I have pens down and eyes up here…[check and wait]…lovely thanks. I’m a bit worried that I’m moving too fast and asking too much of you, and I can see that a lot of you are writing while I’m talking. I think I’d prefer it if everyone just listened and joined in the questioning and then afterwards I will let you correct your work. Great. So Steph just told us that solids cannot be compressed. Please give me another property of solids…Kevin…”

This is much better:

  • Mr B is alert to the information that Danny is giving him
  • Mr B checks to see if it is a widespread problem
  • Mr B pulls the entire class back and rectifies the problem
  • Mr B does not get grumpy or angry at the class, and recognises that it was an issue with his teaching, not with the students

The key message here is about information: a lot of the time we tend to think of things students say to us as being solely about whether they understand something or not. But we have to be alert to an additional dimension to their answers, a dimension that tells us about their engagement, what they are paying attention to and what they are thinking about. We don’t have complete control over our students’ internal mental worlds, but by getting into good, Ratio-building habits and by listening carefully to the information they are giving us, we can push things in the right direction. I will leave you with two quotes that I hope ram home the relevance of this kind of approach and perspective:

“Attention is the gateway to cognition.”

Mike Hobbiss

“Learning happens when people have to think hard.”

Rob Coe