Teaching the quiet ones

On Friday I was at an assembly, answering children’s questions about my career path and about having Tourette’s. It was lovely. Hands shooting up, curious faces, the kind of unfiltered questions that unfiltered children ask. A boy put his hand up. I looked at him, smiled, gave him the space to ask a question. A quiet pause, and nothing came out. His mouth opened but the words weren’t there. He froze. Not because he didn’t have a question. You could see it in his eyes, he absolutely had something he wanted to ask. But the moment of being seen, of the whole room turning toward him, had shut something down. The want to speak and the ability to speak had separated from each other entirely.

I see versions of this everywhere in education. That moment where the demand of the task, or even just the demand of being noticed, meets something inside the child that says, nope, not now. It doesn’t matter that the room is full of kind people. It doesn’t matter that everyone is waiting patiently. The body has already made its decision before the brain has had a chance to formulate those words to come out of their mouths. If you’ve ever had the experience it’s full of embarrassment and that weird sinking feeling in your tummy.

This is what I’ve been thinking about since Friday. How the strategies we know work for learning, retrieval practice, low-stakes quizzing, the kind of responsive formative assessment I wrote about in my last blog, sometimes collide with the children who need them most. That boy didn’t freeze during a test. He froze during an assembly where a friendly adult had invited him to speak. If that’s enough to shut a child down, what happens when we put a retrieval quiz on the board and say “have a go”?

Adaptive teaching isn’t just about adjusting content or scaffolding a task. Sometimes it’s about adjusting the emotional architecture of a lesson so that a child can actually access what we’re offering.

Let me start with what we know. Agarwal and colleagues published a study in 2014 that found 72% of students reported feeling *less* nervous about unit tests when they had experienced regular retrieval practice beforehand, and 92% said it helped them learn. That’s a significant finding. The mechanism makes sense. When children have practised retrieving information in low-stakes conditions, the high-stakes moment feels less alien. They’ve been there before, just without the pressure.