Raise your hand vs. speak out
During the teaching portion of a lesson, the teacher will decide whether to convey information to the class through lecture or have the class interact. There are three formats for presenting material: Teacher Only One Talking, Raise Your Hand, and Speak out. When the Teacher Only One Talking approach is used the instructor has the most control and they can cover a lot of content. The downside would be that with this approach the teacher doesn't know which students are comprehending what they are saying. If the instructor should choose a more interactive approach the interaction can happen in two ways: the students can speak out their answers, or they can raise their hands and wait to be called on. If the speak out method is used, it can be very enthusiastic, however it can be detrimental in terms of classroom control. Often times during speak out, the students who are the quickest processors will be the ones speaking out all of the answers. With the Raise your Hand option, the teacher has more control than Speak Out and is able to govern the amount of think time. Whichever method is chosen, there are three ways to signal expectations to students: Verbally, Non-Verbally and Momentum. Momentum happens when the teacher has used the same format several consecutive times. To begin, it is helpful to combine the verbal and the non-verbal so students learn what each signal means. When students are catching on, the teacher can then drop the verbal. After expectations are set and the same approach has been used for several consecutive times, momentum should take over. Here is a table of examples of verbal and non-verbal signals.
Here it is in action. This is a video of a first grade teacher using a signal (raising her own hand) to indicate to the students to raise his/her hand to answer and it is also an example of momentum...she no longer needs to use the frozen hand because students are raising their hand and not blurting out. At the end, the teacher wants to class to speak out. Since this is different from what they had been doing she gives them a non-verbal cue that it is OK to do so but putting her palms up and adding a head bob.