Done well, “Show Call” is a powerful tool for supercharging your students’ work. Not only does it keep them on their toes because it could be their work that is shown, but it can also create a culture where all students are keen to help one another improve. In this piece, Darren Leslie explores how he uses Show Call in his lessons.
One of my favourite techniques from Teach Like a Champion 3.0 is Show Call. Show Call is where you visually share a student’s work with the class using a visualiser or another tool that can project an image. Show Call affords us several opportunities in our teaching, we could live mark a piece of work, we could praise a student by sharing their best work and we could display work that is incomplete and study it with the class with the aim of improving the work. Over time I have come to prefer the latter. Taking a student’s incomplete work and helping them to make improvements using their classmates’ ideas is becoming a key feature of my classroom.
Lemov asks “what’s the quickest and most productive way to respond to an error in the midst of teaching, in other words? Often, it’s to study the error itself”. And it is this idea that forms the basis of how I use Show Call in my classroom. I use it to respond to student errors and instead of offering the student feedback in the moment I take their work, project it onto the board, and then proceed to ask their classmates for their ideas of how to improve the work, where they might have gone wrong and to check that we can all identify errors in one another’s work.
“what’s the quickest and most productive way to respond to an error in the midst of teaching, in other words? Often, it’s to study the error itself” (Lemov)
Building a classroom culture where this is part of the day-to-day workings of the room takes time and in the early days of teaching a class, I will project complete work that is correct and use it as an opportunity to live mark and provide praise for the student whose work is being projected. This helps to normalise the technique and build awareness that at any moment I may take your work and share it with the class. Getting this right is vital if we are to progress to using Show Call to its full potential.
Over time I will begin to take student work that is incomplete, missing a key step or with a few common errors so that we can study the error together, as a class. There are some key ingredients to getting this right and that begins with what Lemov calls ‘the take’.
The Take
The goal is to make the take feel familiar to the student, like an everyday occurrence that is safe, and that nothing bad will happen. The first few times I project a student’s work I will offer a quiet explanation: “your work is great. I would love to share it with the class” or “this is brilliant. I’d love to share it”.
As it becomes routine, I transition to taking their work with them knowing it will be shared. First by letting them know, “this is great. I can’t wait to share it” and slowly moving on to seamlessly taking their work with a nod of thanks and appreciation helping to communicate the normalcy of this in the classroom. Throughout, a smile and a thank you go a long way in helping to build a culture where the students are comfortable with sharing their work and the practice of studying errors.
After the students recognise that sharing their work is part and parcel of the classroom, I can then begin my circulation by declaring, “I am coming round to look for great work to Show Call”, making it something for the students to strive for in the classroom.
Getting this part right is arguably the most important aspect of a Show Call. We would never want to humiliate a student or make them feel targeted so being super selective on whose work you Show Call, especially at the beginning will help to generate a culture where students’ work is studied deeply.
The Reveal
The way that we ‘reveal’ work will shape how students interpret it and sets the tone for the work that lies ahead. Initially, I won’t name the student whose work is being beamed onto the projector. I will state that “we are going to look at someone’s work and talk about it for a little bit” setting the scene for the discussion to follow. It’s important to note that the tone that you use needs to be as casual as possible, like this is the most normal thing in the world to happen.
“The way that we ‘reveal’ work will shape how students interpret it and sets the tone for the work that lies ahead.”
As we begin to study errors more deeply naming the author of the work can come into play but often maintaining anonymity can be super powerful. We could move on, saying “let’s check someone’s work to see if they remembered to simplify their fraction” and if we wanted to use names we could say “Here’s how Daisy solved this problem. What do you think?” or “Martin has made a simple common error. Take a minute to look at his work silently to see if you can spot it”.
Now that the work has been displayed and the students are giving it their full attention what happens next should always focus on getting better and helping the students get better at the task in hand.
The Cognitive Work
As the work is being beamed onto the projector from under the visualiser an important part is considering how you want the students to interact with it. Perhaps they could read it silently for a minute and compare it with their own work or maybe they could discuss it with a shoulder partner. Whatever path you choose making sure that it is the students that are doing most of the cognitive work is key. You could say “take a minute to silently read Jamie’s work” followed by “take thirty seconds to share with your partner how you would solve this problem”.
With either option I would then cold call a student to have them share their thoughts “Gabriel, what do you think?” or “Keira, what should Jamie do to fix his error”. As the students are offering their thoughts and building on one another’s ideas I will chart the conversation on the board over the top of the image being projected, helping everyone to keep on track. By now the students will have concluded and it is time to wrap up the conversation.
Sometimes, I will provide a review to make sure everyone knows how to fix the error we have just studied and other times I will say “as Keira mentioned Jamie needed to do this, so take a minute now to tidy up your work”. It is important that time is given for students to tidy their work and make any necessary changes before moving on.
Show Call is a regular feature in my classroom and with time it becomes a rigorous process for studying errors and what makes it powerful is that through questioning and probing it is the students themselves that improve the work of their peers. This builds a scholarly culture to the classroom that keeps the cognitive workout firmly on the side of the students.
