60-Second Strategy: Back Pocket Questions

When the clock is ticking down before the bell rings, it’s easy for a classroom to get a bit out of control. Students may get up, start talking, and even spill into the hallway. Witnessing this, middle school Spanish teacher Jamie Midyette wanted to find a solution to keep her students engaged until the very last second—so in her classes at Albert Hill Middle School in Richmond, Virginia, she started implementing a strategy called back pocket questions.

Back pocket questions can be just that—questions a teacher has written on index cards that they can literally keep in their pocket. Midyette chooses to use her interactive whiteboard, often projecting sentences in Spanish with a blank for a missing word. The prompts may relate to the current unit or they can be review, and they can be pulled from any subject area.

In Midyette’s class, a student volunteer flips through cards with students’ names on them and randomly selects one. Midyette asks that student if they would like to respond. If they say yes, they read the full sentence out loud and fill in the blank on the fly. As a reward for participating, Midyette offers them a sticker and asks their fellow students to celebrate their work by snapping their fingers. Then the student volunteer selects the next name.

A flexible closing activity can fill as much or as little time as you have—with this one, in just a minute or two several students will get the opportunity to practice their vocabulary, and many others will benefit by listening. Crucially, using back pocket questions contributes to a classroom environment in which everyone is seated and still learning until the bell signals that it’s truly time to go.

The back pocket questions activity originated from Doug Lemov’s book Teach Like a Champion. The sentences on the interactive whiteboard originate from Simon’s Cat, by Simon Tofield, and are adapted from French teacher Allison Litten of Hartford High School in Hartford, Vermont.