In BBC’s The Classroom Experiment, Dylan Wiliam’s first intervention is to ban hand-raising in the classrooms he works with and replace it with lollipop sticks. You can read more about it in “Where Hands-Up in Class Is Banned.”
The idea still causes a stir. Search online and you’ll find headlines ranging from School Bans Pupils from Raising Hands in Class to Hands-up: Bring back the practice into the classroom, says government behavioural tsar.
Watching the hands-up segment (from about 5:20 to 16:16), I found myself agreeing with the problem Wiliam was trying to solve:
- Every child deserves a level playing field that isn’t dominated by the students who demand the teacher’s attention.
- Teachers need to hear from the students who don’t volunteer.
- There should be no place to hide for students who are unwilling, or not yet able, to engage.
- Not knowing the answer shouldn’t be a barrier to taking part.
Two Sides of the Same Problem
When I was a kid, I came home from school complaining that my teacher never called on me as much as I wanted:
“They see me raising my hand and then glance over it only to pick someone who isn’t even raising their hand!”
— Zach, 5 years old
Every class has a few students like me. According to the BBC program, only about 25% of students consistently put their hands up.
Whenever I complained, my mom told me she’d had the opposite problem. She was the only Deaf student in a small rural town, and she sat at the back hoping the teacher wouldn’t call on her. If she was called on, she likely hadn’t heard the question. So she stared into her lap until the teacher got uncomfortable and asked someone else.
My wife was an A+ student, but her teachers’ main complaint at conferences was that she never raised her hand, even when she clearly knew the answers. They generally left her alone.
The eager hand-raiser and the student hiding in the back are two sides of the same problem. When hands-up is how we check understanding, the teacher hears from a handful of volunteers and has to guess about everyone else.
The Problem Isn’t Who Gets Picked
Lollipop sticks fix part of the problem. They send the message that anyone could be asked at any time. But they still hear from only one student per question, while the rest of the class listens.
I don’t think the primary goal should be choosing who answers more fairly. The goal should be for every student to answer, every time.
That’s very doable:
- Choral responses on a signal. Ask the question, give thinking time, then signal for the whole class to answer together. You hear immediately whether the class has it.
- Mini-whiteboards. Everyone writes an answer and holds it up at once. In a few seconds you can scan the room and see exactly who’s got it and who hasn’t.
- Cold calling. After the whole class has responded, call on individual students to check, extend or explain, rather than waiting for volunteers.
When every student responds, there’s nowhere to hide and nobody to dominate. The quiet student and the eager one are both doing the thinking.
Cold Calling Is a Tool, Not a Trap
Cold calling gets a bad reputation, and it can be done badly. Picking a student who you know is lost, just to make a point, doesn’t help anyone.
Done well, cold calling comes after clear modeling, with questions pitched so most students can succeed. It isn’t a gotcha. It tells students that their thinking matters and that everyone is expected to take part. When students regularly experience answering correctly, being called on stops being something to fear.
If Students Can’t Answer, Look at the Teaching
When students can’t answer, the usual problem isn’t who you picked. It’s that the explanation and the examples didn’t land.
That’s the real value of hearing from everyone. Frequent responses from the whole class tell you whether to move on or reteach. If half the whiteboards are wrong, calling on someone else won’t fix it. A better explanation, or another round of examples, will.
As Tom Bennett told The Telegraph:
“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.”
Hands-Up Still Has a Place
I’m not for banning hands-up outright. Students should be able to raise their hands to ask a question, and it can work fine in a genuinely open discussion.
What I’d drop is hands-up as the default way to check whether students have learned something. For that, every student should answer, every time.
Post updated 11/4/2026
