We student-teachers were required to implement one of three prescribed strategies in our classroom teaching, and to report on its outcome and benefits. Of the three, two would most naturally span multiple days of class, which for many of us would require additional coordination since several teachers are allotted to each classroom and in most classrooms, thus, each teacher is (mostly) responsible for planning one or two days per week. Consequently, as a perusal of the blogs demonstrates, almost everyone chose the third, which is dubbed, perhaps strangely, “cold calling”: each student’s name is written on a card, and each student is called upon (for whatever they are called upon to do) when his card has come to the top of the stack.
I was familiar with this technique from my freshman mathematics tutorial at St. John’s, when Mr. Black used it to determine which student would demonstrate which proposition at the board. The stack came to be called the Stack of Death, to which Mr. Black responded by rather uncreatively calling it the Stack of Life. I disliked the system because it made a grander production of what should have been (and what, in my other three years of mathematics tutorials, was) a simple and relatively low-pressure affair. What was ideally to be a somewhat open introduction and invitation to a conversation became a solo performance and an artificially heightened responsibility. Mr. Black’s ambiguous grin as he read each card – was he happy to be reminded specifically of each student, of whom he was fond?, or was the reminder an occasion for sadistic glee? – unnecessarily increased the trauma of being expected to demonstrate successful memorization before a group. It was a symptom of this method that, between (infrequent) shufflings of the deck, computations of probability were discussed before each class, taking into account the number of remaining unknown cards, as well as the complexity, length, and conversation-worthiness of assigned propositions (which factors were taken to determine the odds of getting through x propositions in a given class, and thus through x cards from the top of the deck). On those mornings when Mr. Black began by shuffling the deck, one could see whose odds had been high or low by the looks of relief or joy around the room as the odds were again leveled.
That said, there is a great difference between drawing cards to determine who must lead the class through a three to forty minute mathematical demonstration and drawing cards to determine who gets to read aloud the next paragraph from “A Rose for Emily” (or whatever). Nevertheless, since virtually everybody seemed to be trying the Cold Call I thought it would be no harm and would increase the data in the pool if I tried a modified form of it: I drew cards before class, recording the results to a list; I called on students pseudo-randomly as they were ordered on the list, and they never knew about the cards.
So. The results, as one might expect, were not so very different from those of the unmodified form, or of any other more-or-less even-handed method of getting through all of the students. The benefit of their knowing about and seeing the cards is the perception that the teacher is removed from the decision, that they are chosen not by a man with prejudices but by the whimsy of the Fates – though of course this could be an illusion if the teacher were to stack the deck or to read names from cards where they were not in fact written. Leaving the cards (or dice, or whatever) at home after using them to make a list does eliminate the benefit of perceived randomness, and hyper-sensitive students or those unfavored by chance might still feel picked-on; but the grandiosity of drawing the card, the drama of it, and thus some of the pressure, might thus be relieved.
Other benefits, like a better guarantee of getting to every student, of an actual elimination of teacher bias, and of gaining such benefits without, say, going around the room in a circle so that students know when their turn will come and can disengage until then, are maintained.