i sleep without air-conditioning: required #3

a rather unexciting obervation on: cold calling - a "muddiest part of the lecture" procedure designed to generate student participation.

all you need, kids, is a group of students, some 3x5 index cards, and a writing implement. before class, write each student's name on a card, and shuffle the deck. during your lesson, pick cards randomly/semi-randomly, and require that the child indicated by your selection participate at that given point in the lesson (e.g. answer a question, go up to the board, etc.)

while i never had the opportunity to actually use this method (nor any of the others), i (a) had intended to, and (b) observed joel use it. while this may not be sufficient for a blog-experience-reflection cluster, it's all i've got.

the method seemed rather effective - sleepers were less alseep than usual (in fear of being caught "cold," perhaps), and talkers were prevented from dominating class discussion. my only real concern is that i'd rather this be an procedure that students were more prepared for, and thus had developed expectations concerning the spontaneous environment "cold calling" would generate. for, i think the best feature of this method is its mechanical, impersonal face - and, this would be detracted from in a situation where "cold calling" were introduced in response to an unbalanced system of student response in the classroom. while its success at a superficial level is apparant, the possibilities of its effect on a more deep educational/cultural level seem promising - perhaps resulting in a developed student response to a more active, object-indifferent response environment. granted, this can only be devloped/observed in a classroom setting with a different sense of time/permanence than our summer school class; i intend on integrating cold-calling, and related spontaneous modifiers/generators into my class in the fall, in the attempts of hardwiring the social environment of my classroom against certain typical patterns of static social/behavioral modes.