The Unteachables Podcast

#141: Tired of blank stares and the same 5 hands up? Here's how to get whole-class engagement (WITHOUT relying on cold-calling)

• Claire English • Season 7 • Episode 141

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This tiny tweak could change your whole classroom vibe.

If you’ve ever found yourself gripping onto those five students who always put their hands up while the rest of the class stares blankly out the window—or worse, starts low-key mutinies—you are NOT alone.

In this episode, I’m giving you a front seat to a game-changing shift I made in how I asked students to engage. It's a small upgrade that completely changed the energy in my classroom. And no, it's not a paddle pop stick in sight.

I’ll take you back to the chaos I experienced when cold calling backfired, why the same students always put their hands up, and what I realised was actually the goal when it comes to whole-class engagement (hint: it's not just getting more mouths moving).

You’ll hear practical ways to upgrade your questioning on the spot, why “write it on your sticky note and slap it on your forehead” can be pedagogical GOLD, and how micro tweaks like this can be low-effort but high-impact.

If your class is giving “two kids do all the work and everyone else is coasting,” this episode is your roadmap out of it.

Let’s roll the tape!

What you’ll learn:

  • Why cold calling, name pickers, and paddle pop sticks might not be helping you build engagement (and what might work better)
  • How to shift from passive invitations to explicit, all-in instructions
  • Four easy ways to upgrade classic questions like “Who can find the simile?” and “What’s the main message?”
  • Why shout-outs, whiteboards, and sticky notes beat raised hands any day of the week
  • The sneaky ways we accidentally teach students it’s OK to opt out—and how to change that
  • How to engage quiet processors and anxious students without triggering defiance or freeze responses
  • One surprising tool for building rapport while building engagement

Resources & Links:

👉 Join the $1 Kickstart: https://www.the-unteachables.com/kickstart

👉 Waitlist for The Behaviour Club: https://www.the-unteachables.com/tbc


Have a question, comment, or just want to say hello? Drop us a text!

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Speaker 1:

Oh, hi there, teachers, welcome to the Unteachables podcast. I'm your host, claire English, and I am just a fellow teacher, a toddler mama and a big old behavior nerd on a mission to demystify and simplify that little thing called classroom management. The way we've all been taught to manage behavior and classroom manage has left us playing crowd control, which is not something I subscribe to, because we're not bouncers, we're teachers. So listen in as I walk you through the game, changing strategies and I mean the things that we can actually do and action in our classrooms that will allow you to lean into your beautiful values as a compassionate educator and feel empowered to run your room with a little more calm and, dare I say it, a lot less chaos. I will see you in the episode. Hello, hello, wonderful teacher, welcome back to the Unteachables podcast. It is brilliant to have you here. If you're a first time listener, hello, welcome. I'm Claire, I'm your host and I'm here to help you make classroom management feel a little bit less daunting, a little bit more practical. And if you're an avid listener, I'm sorry that I took a little one week hiatus last week. I ghosted you a little bit. I had all intentions to record an episode and I'm like you know what my daughter's not at daycare today. I really actually just want to spend some time with her and I was just feeling really burnt out and I just needed that quality time with my little girl. So and I thought you know what? I haven't had an episode off for a year, so I thought that I had a little bit of your faith in me in the bank, that I'd come back. And here I am, and this week I am talking about something that I know that a lot of us struggle with and I know it's going to be a great and really, really tangible and helpful episode. So make sure you stick with me. I will be talking about whole class engagement and, you know, getting all of your students involved and you know when students sit there and stare at the wall or pretend to listen and they start glazing over, just whole class engagement stuff, getting students to be engaging rather than disrupting or rather than, you know, just looking out the window. So it's going to be a really practical one.

Speaker 1:

The issues that I had in my early career was that you know you've got a class of 30 there and you've just got the same like five, like the same handful of students, maybe five students contributing, and the rest of them are just sitting there, not. And you know, these students are like, really quick to answer, they're really keen, they've always got their hands up, they're always wanting to answer, say something. And you love these students because you're not talking to yourself. You're like, oh my gosh, yes, anybody who can contribute, you are golden. But the problem is that if you've only got five contributing, you've got the rest of that 75% just sitting there disengaging or feeling like they can take their foot off the accelerator or feel like they don't have to engage. There's no expectation for them to engage because other students always fill that gap. But I let those students fill that gap all of the time because, as I said, like it's just easier and it's like this relief that you're not standing there waiting for anybody to reply. You've always got somebody to you know, step in, to reply. You've always got somebody to to you know, step in.

Speaker 1:

But the problem is with that whole situation, that whole scenario of only a few students putting their hands up and contributing, the problem, outside of the fact that you know you don't want students to think that they can just disengage, it's that, more often than not. Those five that are contributing aren't necessarily the ones that have the best answers and not necessarily the ones that you know can contribute the most insights or interesting stuff to the conversation. They're actually just the ones that can process information really quickly, they're the ones that can access the information and language really quickly in their minds and they're the ones that just feel confident enough to speak up in front of the group. So, even if you do have students there who are really keen, they've got insights, they're interested they're not contributing to that discussion. And I know that's me. Like I sit in staff meetings and I always am someone that kind of has to formulate an idea in my mind before I say it. I'm not one to just kind of like put things out there. And it always frustrated me because when we're having, like you know, a staff discussion around the table, maybe about curriculum or something like that, I did have some really interesting things to say. Well, I thought so anyway, but I would never be able to say that because I would always feel like I needed to like get my, get my my ideas straight first before I said them. I wanted to make sure what I was saying was doing justice to what I was thinking in my mind and our students are really similar to that.

Speaker 1:

Some students aren't able to process things quickly. They want to be able to think about things a little bit more carefully. So we have to consider those students when we're going into a lesson where we're asking them to engage. Now, at the same time as all of that's happening, everyone else is learning in the classroom that it's okay and it's safe to opt out because those are the expectations we're sending non-verbally, because we're not putting things in place to expect whole class engagement. If, day after day we're sending non-verbally because we're not putting things in place to expect whole class engagement, if day after day we're saying, hey, what do you think about this? And the same students are replying the rest of the class are like, okay, sweet, every time, you know, my teacher wants somebody to contribute. If I don't contribute, I don't need to contribute. If I'm not offering my contributions up on a platter, it doesn't matter, I don't need to contribute. If I'm not offering my contributions up on a platter, it doesn't matter, I don't need to. So it's, they're safe, they feel okay to opt out of that.

Speaker 1:

So I've done a lot of things to try to combat that over my career. Right, I've tried the cold calling students. I've tried using pedal pop sticks in a jar. I've tried using random like name picker websites. I've done all of that kind of stuff just to go okay, well, maybe if it's more random, maybe if students know at any time that they can be picked out to contribute in front of the class, then they're all going to be engaged, right? But the result was not that it wasn't what I expected it to be or what I wanted it to be, and that's like, really, the only thing I thought in my head to do, like, okay, well, I'm just going to call, call, I'm just going to make sure students know that at any time I could be calling their name out. But the result was the answers that I was getting from these students were lacking, or students would be shutting down or saying I don't know.

Speaker 1:

I was seeing an increase in more defiant behaviors. I was getting more pushback. Things in my classroom just felt a little bit off and not what I wanted them to be. They didn't feel like a good vibe for me. Some students were just complying and I was getting more engagement, like I was, but at what expense? Because some students were being pushed into fight, flight or freeze states, especially those with higher anxiety or a PDA profile or ODD profiles. So students were responding to it and I was getting more engagement, but then at what cost?

Speaker 1:

Because we have to think about what the actual goal is here. Like when we're trying to get students to contribute to class discussions. Is our goal just to get as many students to talk as possible, or is our goal to get students thinking and contributing and learning and being a part of that community and sharing? Like, what is the goal here? Because when I used cold calling and paddle pop sticks and random name picker websites, I was going off the goal. I just want to get more students contributing here. Like, I just want to get more students opening their mouths and saying something when I ask them a question, but that's not the. That wasn't the right goal for me. It wasn't the goal that we should be having. The goal should be something more meaningful and it's about their learning.

Speaker 1:

Isn't it Not just like about some kind of yeah, like external thing that we want students to do? It's not about the control over our students. It's about wanting to facilitate those things, but it needs to be doable for us and it needs to be done in a way that we can weave it into our everyday practice. So it needs to be doable and, you know, tangible and all of those things. So we need to upgrade our instruction. We can do this through the tangible tools that we use, like the actual things that we provide students to support them, to contribute, and the way that we're actually, like, verbally, tasking students to use these tools.

Speaker 1:

If you're in the behavior club this month, it is all about the engagement boost, the engagement upgrade and the instruction upgrade. So if you're having these issues that I'm talking about, I strongly suggest that, instead of listening to this podcast episode because I'll be giving you a few takeaways but if you really really want to like delve deep into this and get all of the strategies, I suggest you go in and log onto the behavior club and watch those sessions. They are incredible. I take you through 12 tools and then help you apply those to upgrade your instructions and to get whole class engagement and just significantly reduce low-level behaviors, off-task behaviors, disruptive behaviors and increase all of those beautiful things that we want, all of those things that are more aligned with our why, thinking, learning, sharing all of those things. So some of these tools and strategies include quick tallies and whiteboards and multiple choice movement and show me cards, shout it out, sticky note slams which is one of my favorite using sentence starters and more. So I've got 12 tools there that we can use to help to boost that whole class engagement. But for the purposes of this podcast of, of course, you can't see the actual training, but I just want to give you a taste. So I'm going to go through how I upgraded my instruction using just a few of those strategies. So, and tell me if I mean tell me gosh, you can't tell me. Obviously it's a one-way conversation, but, uh, pop into my inbox. I'm more than happy to hear if this does resonate with you at all.

Speaker 1:

But when I was struggling with whole class engagement, my questioning of my students always sounded a little bit like this like who can tell me what the main message of this text is? Who can find the simile? Hands up if you can find the mistake in this sentence. Who might know what we have to write next? And all of these questions have one thing in common that they're really vague, they're really passive and they're open invitations for students to pop their hand up and contribute. So those first five were like all over this. They were sweet yeah, I've got it, miss. Like there's the simile, but the only ones that are RSVPing to those invitations are those same five students. We're not getting any other students if we're putting out those questions.

Speaker 1:

So we need to zhuzh this up. We need to boost the way that we are requesting whole class engagement or encouraging whole class engagement, not in a way that's like power over hey, if you don't contribute and you don't answer me when I call your name out of this random picker, then I'm going to make a phone call home and tell your parent or carer that you're not engaging. Like that's not going to help us meet our actual goal of engagement and learning and all of those wonderful things. The goal for us giving instructions should be to make them clear and they should be explicit actions that every single student in the room is required to follow. So this is what I mean.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to give you two examples of how I can upgrade the instructions that I just told you. So all of those ones that kind of sounded like like what's the main message? Who can find the simile? Hands up, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to show you how I would upgrade those using some of those tools. So, one of the old instructions who can tell me what the main message of this text is? That's passive, that's vague, open invitation. I might have a few students putting their hands up and saying, oh, the main message is that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Instead of that, I might upgrade my instruction to involve the whole class and be non-verbally expecting my students Like that expectation is being reinforced that every single one of them is going to engage.

Speaker 1:

So I might say write the main message of the text on your slip and swap it with your partner Immediately. There's an expectation of every single student then to be telling me what the main message of the text is. It takes a little bit longer to do that, but you're going to get this richness in the discussion. So they're writing their main message on the slip of paper that you give them and they're swapping it with their partner. That's another one of the strategies. Mini slips is what I use.

Speaker 1:

The next one is write the main message of the text on a sticky note and stick it up on the board. Or write the main message of the text on a sticky note and stick it on your forehead, or write the main message of the text on a sticky note and put it in this box as I go around and I'm going to read out a few from that box. It's something incredibly explicit, tangible. Every single student is required and expected to do that, and you are immediately, and some students might not be able to do it. Some students might be stuck with what a main message is. Some students might struggle with identifying the main message, but immediately what you're doing is seeing who actually is struggling and who's just opting out of the conversation. So it's just brilliant for us to be able to like look around the room and see who's not writing on their sticky note and that's a student that I can talk to a little bit later rather than going. Okay, well, there's 25 other students here who aren't contributing, so I'm just going to assume that they know what the main message is, because I can't talk to 25 students about their engagement.

Speaker 1:

The next one might be write one word on your whiteboard that best sums up the text, and when I count down from three, you're going to flip it over and hold it up for me Again at a glance, just around the room, you'll be able to see what students are thinking. You'll be able to like, read it again. That one actually doesn't take that much longer. They've got their little mini whiteboard or they've got a piece of paper. You don't have to do anything fancy. They write their word on their paper or their whiteboard, they flip it up and you can be like, oh, jenny, that's a great idea. You know, like, yes, that word's fantastic, pete, that one's fantastic, yes, james, awesome. And you're just able to then facilitate this beautiful discussion around the main message of the text from the ideas that you've gotten, not from five students who might contribute every single lesson, but you're then able to pick different words from different students that you might not hear from, and you can give them that positive feedback. You can build their confidence, which is something that's so beautiful.

Speaker 1:

Another one you can say what's the main message. I'll give you one minute thinking time and then be ready to discuss, because one of the strategies is as well one of the tool, like the engagement toolbox strategies is just to give them a little bit more time. You don't always have to do something that's like really tangible that every single student does Sometimes. Just giving a little bit more thinking time allows those students who require a little bit of more like time to process their ideas and then formulate their ideas and, you know, say their ideas and feel confident in that. It just allows them to be able to contribute, which is sometimes just enough to get that discussion a little bit more rich and meaningful. So those are four ideas on how you can flip something like who can tell me what the main message of this text is into something that is upgraded and immediately you're shifting the expectation from hey, open invitation, who wants to come along and who wants to tell me something, to hey, like, write it on your, write it on your whiteboard, write on your sticky note. Here's something tangible that you can do to show me that you are engaging and you're listening and you're a part of this conversation, in this, in this classroom.

Speaker 1:

So the next one who can find the simile? Oh God, I said I don't know how many times I've said that in my career honestly who can find the simile? Who can find the metaphor? Who can tell me what the metaphor is? English teacher things. So instruction, upgrade write the simile on your whiteboard. When the timer buzzes, you're going to hold it up, so give them a really specific amount of time, so they know exactly how much time they have to be able to find that simile, write it on their whiteboard and they can flip it when the timer buzzes.

Speaker 1:

I love this, again, because you can look across the room and at a glance be able to say, yep, you've all got the simile. I think we can all tick off the outcome that you know what a simile is Fantastic everybody. Well done. So again, you're just taking the temperature of the whole class. You might be able to see a couple of students who need to have a little bit more information around it. You might see the whole class is mixing up similes and metaphors, so you have to revisit that. So it's really good just to take the temperature.

Speaker 1:

The next one find the simile. You're going to shout it out as a class when the timer gets to zero or when I count down from three, three, two, one go and they will tell you the simile all at once. I love the whole class shouted outs because you are not like it's like low risk for students, but you're still getting like the energy up and students are contributing more, and it's something that's really clear and tangible. The next one write the simile on the sticky note. When you're done, pop it on your forehead and you can put a little time timer there. You can give them a timeframe or you can not, like it just depends on what you want to do. But I love the popping it on their forehead thing because it just it brings a little bit of novelty and there's a little bit of a laugh.

Speaker 1:

I was talking to people the other day cause I popped up on my Instagram story like these celebration cards that I made and they're really cheesy. There's like 40 of them, things like the participation potato and like they're little kind of celebration cards that you can give to students. That like I was trying to think of ways that I could replace like tangible rewards, but still do something that is fun and like builds community and give students a little bit of recognition, just having a laugh, right, and not just things like, okay, you've gotten an A in your in your assignment, so I created these celebration cards. Right, they're not available just yet, so don't ask me. Don't ask me. At the moment I still have to pop them up on my. Like. Shopping in the baby club not not happening yet October the 1st, anyway.

Speaker 1:

So these celebration cards are hilarious and I love it because I had a bunch of teachers reply to me saying, oh my gosh, my year tens would think these were so cheesy, but they would be trying to collect every single one of them and I love it and I feel like this is Like and that's who I created it for, right, the middle schoolers who think they're too cool but they think it's going to be a laugh. Or you know, like I'm dorky, miss English, and I come along with these cars and they can. You know, like we're building that rapport because they're mocking me a little bit and, like you know, I'm playing it up and anyway. So I absolutely love anything that's kind of building that rapport in the I hope I'm making any sense whatsoever but like we're building rapport not by hey, what's your brother's name? What, what's your favorite movie? Like we're building rapport in the everyday, through these micro moments that are just wonderful for building rapport. And in these instructions it does the same thing. Like you're having a bit of a laugh with your students. They're popping on their forehead, their fingers a bit cheesy, but even though the fingers a bit dorky and cheesy, they're still doing it and they're having a laugh at their mates, and so I just love anything that embeds rapport building naturally and gives us an opportunity to have a laugh with our class while still kind of staying on track with the learning. Anyway, that was a really big tangent.

Speaker 1:

The fourth, fourth thing, the fourth instruction upgrade for who can find the simile is just draw a picture on your whiteboard that represents the simile. There are countless ways that I could instruction upgrade the two instructions that I have gone through. So who can find the simile and what's the main message? There are so many things, but these instruction upgrades are just so you can do like as many, like there's so many options, right, using those tools that I provided. But they're just us being really explicit with students around what we expect. We expect their engagement, we expect their attention, we expect their involvement and not in a way that is high stakes, but in a way that's woven into the lesson and instruction really beautifully and naturally, because this should not feel like an extra thing on your plate. That is not what I'm about. The things I teach are things that just can become a normal, everyday part of your pedagogical practice.

Speaker 1:

At the end of the day, if it's not realistic, you're not going to do it. And if you're not going to do it, then what's the point of trying? It needs to be possible for us to do in the context of being teachers and having a million and one things going on. If you are one of my behavior clubbers, along with that whole engagement, boost training, please go and watch that. If any of this resonated, because it's so good, you've also got a bunch of plug and play resources just print, use. You can immediately upgrade your instruction. I try to give you as much stuff as possible so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's better that I do it rather than 500 of you do it.

Speaker 1:

At the time of recording this, the BehaviClub is currently closed as a wait list, but you can join the $1 kickstart at any time if you want to work with me and just get a taste of the flipping magic that you can make with your classroom management by using easy and tangible strategies, just like the ones that I discussed in this podcast episode. If you haven't joined the kickstart yet, come and do it anytime. Come and join $1. And it is like golden. It really, really is, and I could have charged like a whole course cost for this, but I decided to create and put something out into the world that can show you that things aren't hopeless and there is so much that you can achieve in your classroom with really simple, quick strategies. Because that feeling of hopelessness that we can get when it comes to classroom management is demoralizing, and I wanted to have something to point teachers towards, because I get so many messages of teachers saying I don't know what to try, I don't know what to do, I feel hopeless, I don't know how long I can stay in the profession, and I wanted somewhere to point teachers towards that was like you can sit down, you can do these five, 10 minute sessions and walk into your classroom tomorrow feeling a thousand percent better about the position that you're in with your classroom management, and I wholeheartedly believe that. So you can go to the-unteachablescom forward slash, kickstart and you can join that at any time that you feel like you want to come and do that. It's brilliant. So, yeah, that's all for this week.

Speaker 1:

Beautiful humans, if you head into your classroom this week and try that instruction upgrade, please don't be shy in popping into my Insta DMs or emailing me and letting me know how it all goes. I would absolutely love, love, love, to hear about it and celebrate you and the changes that you're making in your practice. And, as always, if you loved this episode, it would mean the absolute world to me. If you just went and gave me a quick review five stars preferably. If you went and gave me a review, it would mean a lot because teachers need this support. They really do, and the podcast is the best way that teachers can get the free and on the go support that I freaking wish that I had when I was really in the thick of it. So if you would just give me a lovely review it means so much or even just send it to a teacher friend, make sure you're following along all of the things. Anyway, I will see you next week. I promise I won't ghost you again and bye for now, lovely teacher.

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Claire English

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