



































“Your Hand’s Not Raised? Too Bad: I’m Calling on You Anyway”


Volume 1, Issue 2 

2018 

Copyright 2016 by Alfie Kohn.  Reprinted from www.alfiekohn.org with the author's permission. 

Allies for Education 2018, 1, 2 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe  

 

“Your Hand’s Not Raised? Too Bad: I’m Calling on You 

Anyway” 

Alfie Kohn 
Author and lecturer: Education, parenting, and human behavior 

 
Doctors in training call it “pimping.” A medical student or junior resident is abruptly put on the spot, 

sometimes during patient rounds, as an instructor fires off difficult questions about anatomy, diagnostic 

protocols, or surgical procedures.[1] The practice is defended in pretty much the same way that other 

forms of humiliation, bullying, hazing, or punishment are defended: Keeps ’em on their toes! Shows ’em 

I mean business! Toughens ’em up for when other people abuse them later! And of course that old 

chestnut: I suffered through it; why shouldn’t they?[2] 

Children in school are rarely questioned with such ferocity, but similar moral and pedagogical concerns 

arise — with particular urgency, in fact, precisely because they are younger: Should teachers call on 

students who haven’t indicated they want to talk and, in fact, have tacitly indicated they don’t want to 

talk? 

I recently suggested on Twitter that this practice — “cold-calling” — is so fundamentally disrespectful of 

students that I’d be disinclined to take advice about anything from someone who endorsed it. Reactions 

to my tweet fell into three clusters. The first group basically agreed: “It’s a great way to shame a kid.” 

“Too many teachers actually believe it is a trait of a good teacher, that they can ‘make’ people 

‘participate.'” “Some teachers torture my 14 yr old with this. I have no respect for them.” One writer 

likened it to “using grades as coercion,” adding that it was particularly obnoxious to call on (that is, call 

out) a student whom the teacher believed wasn’t paying attention. 

The consensus among these folks is that the practice is repugnant because a teacher is basically saying, 

“It appears you’d rather not contribute to the discussion right now, but I don’t care about your 

preference and I’ll use my power to force you to contribute.” If this isn’t disrespectful, then that word 

has no meaning. Moreover, the harmful effects aren’t limited to that particular kid. As with “time out,” 

in which younger children who displease the teacher are forcibly isolated, everyone who watches this 

happen, thinking, “That could be me next time,” feels less safe. 

I’m tempted to ask a cold-calling teacher, “How would you feel if an administrator (at a faculty meeting) 

or a speaker (at a workshop) did the same thing to you?” But that’s not really the right question because 

some teachers are sufficiently comfortable in the spotlight that they wouldn’t mind. The point is that 

lots of adults, and even more kids, do mind. Our obligation is to imagine the perspective of the specific 

person with whom we’re interacting, not our own likely reaction in their situation. 

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“Your Hand’s Not Raised? Too Bad: I’m Calling on You Anyway” 
Alfie Kohn 

Copyright 2016 by Alfie Kohn.  Reprinted from www.alfiekohn.org with the author's permission. 

Allies for Education 2018, 1, 2 2018 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 

But is it always objectionable to call on kids whose hands aren’t up? That was the challenge offered by a 

second group of tweeters. One said, “Depends how it’s done. If the relationship is good, and it’s a gentle 

invitation to comment, that could be respectful, no?” Another asked: “How about we create a climate 

where children feel happy & confident to raise their hands instead?” 

Fair enough: A smiling, “gentle invitation” (“Chris? I notice you haven’t spoken for awhile. Would you 

like to chime in here?”) — and periodic reassurances that anyone may choose to pass at any time — is 

completely different from a nonnegotiable demand that everyone must answer. And if the way one 

does it is relevant, so too is the reason: Some teachers just want to support reticent kids in speaking up, 

particularly when a thought seems to flicker across their faces. Others, by contrast, are using their 

position of power to create a classroom driven by fear: You’d better be prepared because you never 

know when I’m going to call on you! 

No matter how awful the latter environment may be for students, it can always be rationalized in the 

name of “accountability” — the same word, ironically, that’s invoked by policy makers to impose their 

“do it my way or suffer” version of school reform on teachers. And when students are coerced into 

talking or listening, there’s a euphemism for that, too: “engagement.” Notice that both terms, at least as 

used here, reflect a behaviorist paradigm. The goal is to produce a certain observable behavior; the 

experience of the student — his or her inner life — is irrelevant. 

The practice of mandating student responses as a control strategy is endorsed by people who promote 

classrooms that are militaristic in other ways, too. I’m thinking of an approach associated with “No 

Excuses” charter schools (mostly attended by low-income African-American and Latino students) that’s 

been aptly described as the “pedagogy of poverty”: memorizing facts, practicing skills, and obeying 

authority. “You’ll talk whenever I demand that you do so” — training children to perform on command 

like seals — is, after all, more consistent with a “bunch o’ facts” curriculum than with one rooted in 

inquiry and meaning.[3] (I’m not talking here about teachers keen to elicit participation in a thoughtful, 

open-ended discussion — more about which in a moment — but with those who call out short questions 

that have unambiguous right answers and demand that students spit out those answers in front of their 

peers.) 

Observe one of these classrooms — there are plenty of stomach-turning examples available for 

inspection on YouTube — and you’ll see that pressuring kids to contribute when they’re not ready 

meshes quite well with other disturbing values and practices. When that’s not the case, though — when 

teachers are uncomfortable with a fact-based curriculum or the use of bribes and threats, yet think 

nothing of putting students on the spot — they ought to confront the inconsistency. They may be giving 

with one hand while taking away with the other.[4] 

The third group of respondents to my brief reflection dug deeper into the purpose of, and wondered 

about alternatives to, cold-calling. Several were troubled by the prospect of waiting for students to 

volunteer. One expressed concern that the raising-hands model means hearing from only “20% of kids in 

[what is supposed to be a] whole class discussion.” I certainly understand this objection. Obviously we 

want to create what another respondent called “equitable classroom practice.” We don’t want to 

exclude introverts who are reluctant to speak up and let a few students dominate every conversation. 

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“Your Hand’s Not Raised? Too Bad: I’m Calling on You Anyway” 
Alfie Kohn 

Copyright 2016 by Alfie Kohn.  Reprinted from www.alfiekohn.org with the author's permission. 

Allies for Education 2018, 1, 2 2018 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 

(Here we’re talking about participation in real discussions, not pimping kids to bark out correct 

responses.) 

Still, I believe a student’s choice not to talk should be respected. The fact that there are problems with 

raising hands doesn’t entitle us to turn to the equally flawed option of cold-calling — or vice versa. 

There’s something deeply objectionable about saying “You have to talk when I say you should” just as 

there is about saying, in the words of another Twitter respondent, “You can talk only if I tell you to.” 

These two stances are actually more complementary than opposed. And the primary reason to reject 

the latter isn’t that too few kids will raise their hands. It’s that the classroom remains entirely too 

teacher-centered. Just as it does with cold calling. 

What we need to develop — with students, not just for them — is a model of discussion that encourages 

everyone to speak up when they’re ready without forcing anyone to do so, and that supports the 

community in becoming self-governing rather than giving one person in the room the sole authority to 

decide who talks when. Alongside the strong moral argument for abandoning raising hands and cold-

calling, the process of fashioning a third alternative helps students to acquire an enormously useful 

social skill. Giving them the chance to do so is also a powerful signal of the teacher’s trust in them. 

At this point, I invite you to put this essay aside for 14 minutes to watch a remarkable video of an 

elementary school classroom in Kentucky. In case you’re too busy (or the website is inaccessible), I’ll 

summarize it for you. The teacher starts the school year by asking her students to brainstorm features of 

the kind of classroom they want to have. When one student, perhaps recalling the voices of teachers in 

earlier grades, dutifully proposes “Raising hands instead of yelling out,” the teacher doesn’t just agree 

and happily check off that item on her mental list of Rules I Hoped They’d Suggest. Instead, she wonders 

out loud whether raising hands is really necessary. Might there be other ways to avoid having everyone 

talk at once, ways that don’t vest all the power in the teacher? But the students seem disconcerted by 

any scenario other than the one they’ve been carefully trained to accept over the years, so the teacher 

backs off — for awhile. Later in the year, she invites them to revisit the issue. At that point most of the 

kids feel ready to try out a more democratic model of discussion, and the video ends with evidence of 

how it works: An epilogue shows us the students discussing a story, politely taking turns. Rather than 

controlling the conversation, the teacher listens. 

Ideally, moving beyond hand-raising or cold-calling is part of an ongoing project of creating a 

democratic, caring classroom community, one in which students are helped to feel a sense of belonging 

and given continuous opportunities to make decisions, individually and collectively. This larger project 

plays out in regular class meetings during which they’re invited to propose concrete ideas to make self-

governing discussions run smoothly and fairly. For example, students might come up with strategies to 

encourage shy or soft-spoken kids who really do want to talk. They might brainstorm ways to make sure 

everyone feels as if they can offer opinions and questions without being laughed at. (The teacher also 

may approach certain students individually to make sure the reason they’re quiet isn’t because they fear 

being ridiculed and to ask whether they’d be open to gentle invitations to contribute.) Students can 

reflect on the benefit of having regular opportunities to talk in pairs and small groups rather than always 

as a whole class. As the cooperative learning mavens David and Roger Johnson put it, “No one gets left 

out of a pair.” 

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https://characterandcitizenship.org/cdp-videos/classroom-manage/item/raising-hands


“Your Hand’s Not Raised? Too Bad: I’m Calling on You Anyway” 
Alfie Kohn 

Copyright 2016 by Alfie Kohn.  Reprinted from www.alfiekohn.org with the author's permission. 

Allies for Education 2018, 1, 2 2018 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 

Bringing the kids in on this process is not only respectful and a good way to promote their social, moral, 

and intellectual development — it’s also quite sensible because it produces more good ideas than any 

individual, including the teacher, can come up with on his or her own. And as the year progresses, kids 

may start to join the teacher in extending those gentle invitations to a quiet peer: “Randy, were you 

going to say something just now?” 

At the same time, teachers should be challenging themselves. A decision to avoid cold-calling and hand-

raising isn’t just part of a larger effort to build democratic communities but also part of a larger project 

of improving pedagogy. Most discussions about cold-calling are focused on how to elicit students’ 

responses to a teacher’s questions. But take a step back: Why is the teacher asking most of the 

questions? Students’ willingness to participate, to say nothing of the quality of their learning, might be 

greatly enhanced if most of the questions (that shape the curriculum) were theirs.[5] Likewise, teachers 

need to resist the temptation to grade students on their class participation, which makes it exceedingly 

difficult to encourage authentic discussions in which students are interested in the ideas. Grades poison 

everything they touch, undermining intrinsic motivation to learn and warping the whole classroom 

dynamic. 

A self-governing conversation is a tall order for very young children and also for very large classes (which 

lend themselves to listening rather than learning). In such cases, adjustments and compromises may be 

necessary. But the general rule is that treating students with respect — which means we neither compel 

them to speak nor determine unilaterally who gets to do so — is ethically appropriate, educationally 

beneficial, and practically realistic . . . as long as we’re willing to give up some control. 

Notes 

1.  For example, see http://ow.ly/XyoSs or http://ow.ly/XyoHC 

2.  This is a prominent fork in the road of life. Some people suffer through the indignity or even 

brutality of being mistreated as a newbie, only to turn around, once they’ve attained a little 

seniority, and abuse those who come along after them.  Other people say, “Nobody should have 

to go through what I did. Now that I have some authority, I’ll use it to denounce cruel traditions 

and work to change the system.” 

3.  This approach to teaching generally involves a focus on raising test scores (rather than 

promoting critical thinking); a goal of eliciting mindless obedience (rather than offering 

opportunities for kids to make decisions); and a reliance on rewards and praise for conformity, 

on the one hand, and public humiliation for noncompliance, on the other. See my article “Poor 

Teaching for Poor Children…in the Name of Reform,” Education Week, April 27, 2011. 

4.  Other examples of this phenomenon: Many schools try to create a feeling of community and 

promote constructive conflict resolution but undercut these efforts by refusing to abandon 

punitive interventions like time-outs, detentions, and suspensions. Similarly, the benefits of 

avoiding punishment are negated by the continued use of rewards — “sugar-coated control,” as 

one researcher calls them. And, while one hand may offer a thoughtful curriculum, the other 

http://www.alfiekohn.org/
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe
http://ow.ly/XyoSs
http://ow.ly/XyoHC
http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/poor/
http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/poor/


“Your Hand’s Not Raised? Too Bad: I’m Calling on You Anyway” 
Alfie Kohn 

Copyright 2016 by Alfie Kohn.  Reprinted from www.alfiekohn.org with the author's permission. 

Allies for Education 2018, 1, 2 2018 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 

takes it back by using tests (rather than more authentic assessments) to evaluate students’ 

progress. 

5.  I discussed this issue in “Who’s Asking?”, Educational Leadership, September 2015, drawing on 

the work of Dennie Palmer Wolf, Eleanor Duckworth, and others. 

About the Author 

Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. His fourteen books 

include The Schools Our Children Deserve, Beyond Discipline, The Case Against Standardized Testing, and 

The Homework Myth.  Kohn lectures at education conferences and universities as well as to parent 

groups and corporations, and he has been described in Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most 

outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.”  He lives (actually) in the Boston  

area and (virtually) at www.alfiekohn.org. 

http://www.alfiekohn.org/
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http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/questions/
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