Draft the cold-call question ladder for tomorrow's lesson

Draft the cold-call question ladder for tomorrow's lesson

Four kids answer everything, and the rest of your class has quietly opted out by Week 4. You know it. You can feel it in the room the second you throw an open question up and the same three hands go up. The literature has been unambiguous for a decade (Lemov, Rosenshine, Willingham): frequent low-stakes questioning distributed across the whole class is one of the highest-yield moves in teaching, and hand-raising is the mechanism by which we quietly stop doing it. The gap between knowing that and running it well is a stack of well-designed questions on the desk in front of you, laddered from lowest stakes to highest, with a scripted line ready for every "I don't know". Nobody makes that stack at 7:30am on a Wednesday. Here is the prompt.

The prompt

You are helping me draft a cold-call question ladder for tomorrow's lesson. The goal is to distribute questioning across the whole class, not just the four kids who already have their hand up, and to do it in a way that keeps the room warm and the standard high.

You are working in the tradition of:
- Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion (Cold Call, No Opt Out, Right is Right, Stretch It).
- Barak Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction (frequent low-stakes checks, high success rate at 80%+).
- Daniel Willingham (memory is the residue of thought, students think about what they are asked about).

That means questions must be:
- Laddered: recall, then comprehension, then application, then analysis or evaluation. Not all at once, not all at the top.
- Universally answerable at the bottom of the ladder. Everybody in the room can have a go at question 1.
- Warm by design. Cold-call without warmth is interrogation. Each question needs a follow-up line I can say if the student says "I don't know" that lands as "I'm coming back to you" not "you failed".

CONTEXT
- Year level: [YEAR LEVEL, e.g. Year 9]
- Subject and unit: [e.g. Year 9 Science, Newton's laws]
- The learning intention for tomorrow's lesson: [ONE SENTENCE]
- What I taught yesterday (the recall base): [ONE OR TWO SENTENCES]
- The one hinge concept I need every student to have by the end of tomorrow: [ONE SENTENCE]
- The class in one honest line: [e.g. "27 students, Period 5 on a Thursday, five who dominate and eight who never volunteer"]
- Any named students I want to route into (or protect from) specific questions: [PSEUDONYMS, one line each. "Ask early, low stakes, to reset her" or "Do NOT put on the spot with an analysis question this week"]

PRODUCE, IN THIS EXACT ORDER. NO PRE-AMBLE. START WITH SECTION 1.

1. THE LADDER (ten questions)
Ten questions, numbered 1 to 10, in strict order from lowest cognitive demand to highest. Roughly:
- Q1 to Q3: RECALL. Direct, factual, can be answered in one sentence. Success rate target: 90%+.
- Q4 to Q6: COMPREHENSION and APPLICATION. Explain the concept, or use it in a familiar case.
- Q7 to Q9: ANALYSIS. Compare, contrast, predict what happens if a variable changes.
- Q10: SYNTHESIS or EVALUATION. The hinge question. If a student can answer this cleanly, they have the lesson.

For every question give me FOUR lines:
a) THE QUESTION, in the exact words I should say.
b) WHO TO CALL. One of: "a confident student to model", "a student who has been quiet today", "a student who thinks they know but is fuzzy", "any student, hands down". Vary these across the ten. Do not call on the same profile twice in a row.
c) NO-OPT-OUT LINE. If the called student says "I don't know" or shrugs, the exact one-sentence follow-up I say. Never "have a guess". Options that work: "OK, I'll come back to you after Sam, and I want to hear your version of what Sam says." Or: "Which part of the question is tripping you? The [X] or the [Y]?"
d) RIGHT IS RIGHT LINE. If the student gives a half-right answer, the exact one-sentence follow-up that pushes for the full answer without letting them off the hook. Not "close!". Something like "You've got the mechanism. Now name it." Or "That's what happens. Why?"

2. THE HANDS-DOWN SIGNAL
One sentence I say at the start of the ladder that establishes the norm ("Hands down for this next set, I might call on any of you"). Not preachy. Warm and matter of fact.

3. THE SITTING-OUT WATCHLIST
Three concrete signs that a specific student in the room has quietly checked out during the ladder (not general disengagement signals like "on phone", but specific to a question sequence: e.g. "eye contact drops on Q4 when the level of abstraction lifts", "starts flipping through the book to look busy"). For each, one line on what I do next lesson, not this one.

4. THE NINETY-SECOND VARIANT
If I only have ninety seconds at the start of tomorrow's lesson, the three questions from the ladder I keep, in what order, and why those three.

5. THE WATCH-OUT
Two lines. If tomorrow's class is running hot or unfocused, which of the ten questions I skip (probably the analysis ones that need thinking time), and what I substitute instead (probably one more application question that keeps momentum).

RULES
- Australian English throughout. Colour, realise, analyse. Year 8, not 8th grade. Metre, not meter.
- No em-dashes. No en-dashes. Anywhere. Commas, full stops, parentheses, semicolons only.
- Do not open with "here is your question ladder" or "great topic". Start with Section 1.
- Do not use "guys" or "you guys". Use "everyone" or "the class".
- Do not write questions that can be answered "yes" or "no" unless the follow-up demands the reason. A yes/no question alone is not a cold-call, it is a coin toss.
- Do not write questions that need reading a paragraph first. Cold-call is spoken. If a question needs a stimulus, put a one-line stimulus IN the question.
- If any of my named students should not be cold-called this week (e.g. bereavement, escalating anxiety, incident recovery), and I have flagged that in context, honour it silently. Do not name why in the output.

What it does well

The ladder is the whole point. Ten questions ordered by cognitive demand means every student in the room gets a genuinely answerable question in the first three, which is where you rebuild the buy-in the class has spent a term losing. The "no-opt-out line" and the "right is right line" for each question are the piece nobody drafts and every teacher needs, because those are the exact three-word decisions you have to make in real time under load. Written down, they take a coin flip out of your hands.

Where it falls over

The ladder is only as good as your hinge question, and the model will sometimes draft a Q10 that is not actually the concept you need, it is just harder. Read Q10 first before you run the ladder, and if it is not testing the thing you actually need every student to have, rewrite it and let the model rebuild the ladder underneath. The "who to call" routing is also indicative, not prescriptive. You know your class. If the model tells you to call on "a student who has been quiet today" at Q7 and the quiet student in your Period 5 is currently in survival mode, ignore the routing and pick someone else. The prompt gives you a stack of good moves. The moment-to-moment reading is still on you.

Try it like this

For Year 8 Maths on solving equations: Q1 to Q3 recall inverse operations, Q4 to Q6 apply them to one-step and two-step equations, Q7 to Q9 diagnose why a worked example on the board is wrong, Q10 asks the student to write an equation for a real-world scenario and solve it. That last question is the hinge, and the ladder is the runway.

For Year 10 English on a persuasive text: Q1 to Q3 are direct recall of the contention and two pieces of evidence, Q4 to Q6 identify persuasive techniques and their intended effect, Q7 to Q9 evaluate which technique is doing the heaviest work, Q10 asks the student to argue what the writer's strongest move is and why. If a student stalls on Q10, the no-opt-out line pulls them back to Q7 without shame.

For VCE Legal Studies on a case study: build the ladder around one case. Q1 to Q3 recall the facts, Q4 to Q6 apply the relevant principle, Q7 to Q9 analyse the ruling, Q10 asks the student to predict what would change if one material fact were different. This is exam-track questioning, done every week, on the bus of a normal lesson.

If you only have ninety seconds: run the three-question variant and skip the ladder. Three well-placed questions at the top of the lesson, called cold on three students who did not have their hand up, will change the temperature of the room for the next forty minutes.

The class where every student expects to be called on, warmly and predictably, is a different class. This prompt gives you the stack that gets you there without a redesign of your teaching.