Let children go back to putting their hands up, says schools tsar
After bans on traditional classroom practice, adviser urges teachers to allow their charges to shine
SCHOOLS should return to asking pupils to put their hands up to answer questions, the Government’s behaviour tsar has said, after a number banned the practice.
The traditional request “has been going out of fashion” because it is perceived as encouraging “only certain children to answer questions in class”, according to Tom Bennett.
Mr Bennett, a former teacher and author of books on classroom management, was appointed by ministers to run a review of classroom disruption. He cited cases of trainee teachers being told to pick children at random using lollipop sticks with their names on or giving them colour-coded cups to show whether they have understood.
In a newspaper interview he said: “Teachers can use their common sense. They are perfectly at liberty to ask a child who does not have their hand up to answer. Quite frankly, if you have a teacher asking the same one boy in the class to always answer questions, that is a bigger problem even than using lollipop sticks.”
Five years ago, Ormiston Sir Stanley Matthews Academy in Stoke-on-Trent banned children from raising their hands to answer a question in class. Instead, teachers opted to pick children at random in efforts to stop brighter, more outgoing pupils dominating.
Hertswood School, a Hertfordshire comprehensive, banned children from raising their hands as part of a BBC experiment. It found 13-year-olds learnt twice as quickly when not allowed to put their hands up because it helped the performance of both shy and more confident pupils.
Kim Knappett, president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that raising hands was only one strategy to encourage children to answer questions in the classroom.
She said: “Raising hands should be part of a variety of strategies that teachers use. I myself use the lollipop sticks with children’s name on so you can randomly pick out who is going to an- swer a question. Otherwise I would name a child because I think they need to be drawn back in.”
Dylan William, an emeritus professor at the Institute of Education at London University, has been a champion of stopping children raising their hands. He told the programme: “What matters is if the teacher is only choosing the ones with the hands up with the answer to a question. If they are, then they are only hearing from a small proportion of the class and they are making decisions about whether the class is ready to move on on the basis of bad evidence.
“We found teachers say we let the kids raise their hands anyway but we do choose at random, but they … do seem to be drawn towards the students who are showing eagerness to share an answer.”
‘Teachers can use their common sense. They are perfectly at liberty to ask another child to answer’