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In this edition of ⚗️DistillED, we explore key strategies that maximise student participation and boost thinking at three levels: Everyone, Together, and Anyone — or ETA for short.

Ensuring that all students are thinking is one of the most challenging and important aspects of effective teaching. If, as Daniel Willingham reminds us, “memory is the residue of thought”, how do we design lessons that ensure 100% of students are attentive and cognitively engaged?

Learning is invisible, and we can easily assume students are learning when they are not. Too often, we are misled by what Rob Coe describes as “poor proxies for learning” — things that give the impression of learning without providing reliable evidence that it has actually taken place.

👉 Read about Poor Proxies for Learning here and download the one-page guide.

This is why it is so important for teachers to have a broad toolkit of strategies that allow us to check for understanding and make students accountable for thinking. In my school, I use the term ETA to categorise inclusive participation strategies into three broad levels: Everyone (whole-class response), Together (structured pair talk), Anyone (individual accountability).

The visual below shows how participation can move deliberately between these three levels during a lesson, helping teachers sample thinking across the whole classroom.

There are many strategies that sit within the ETA framework for example, choral response, finger voting (Everyone); turn and talk (Together), lollipop sticks (Anyone) However, the three strategies I have found most powerful are those that strategically sample student thinking in different ways:

EVERYONE (sometimes) → Mini-whiteboards because they allow all students to commit to an answer and make their thinking visible across the whole class (very effective for instant hits of data).

👉 Read more on Mini-Whiteboards here

TOGETHER (often) → Paired talk because it gives students time to rehearse, refine, and clarify their thinking through structured academic discussion (very effective for reluctant students to build confidence before sharing).

👉 Read more on Think, Pair, Share here

ANYONE (default) → Cold calling because it maintains individual accountability and signals that every student’s thinking may be called upon (very effective default questioning mode for teachers to adopt).

👉 Read more on Cold Calling here

Here’s a bullet proof list of what Everyone, Together, Anyone (ETA) strategies ARE and ARE NOT:

As explored in Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?, learning does not happen without thinking. The diagram below builds on Willingham’s original idea by illustrating how learning depends on the interaction between the environment, attention, working memory, and long-term memory over time.

First, students attend to new information. They then think about that information in working memory, connecting it with what they already know. Through this process of thinking and remembering, the information is encoded into long-term memory, where it contributes to the development of knowledge structures, or schemas.

As Kirschner et al remind us, “The aim of all instruction is to alter long-term memory. If nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned.” (2006). Committing to evidence-informed practices such as the ETA framework (Everyone, Together, Anyone) increases the likelihood that students will move through this learning process.

👉 Read how learning happens in this post on The Simple Model of the Mind

However, changing classroom practice is hard — not because teachers don’t care, but because teaching runs on habits.

In a complex environment like a classroom, we cannot consciously deliberate over every decision we make. There are simply too many things happening at once: explaining new ideas, monitoring understanding, managing behaviour, responding to questions, and keeping the lesson moving. To cope with this complexity, teachers develop stable patterns of thinking and action — what educator Josh Goodrich calls stasis.

Under time pressure and constant repetition, classroom behaviours quickly become automatic. Over time, teachers can fall back on familiar patterns — relying on volunteers, assuming silence means understanding, or moving on before every student has had a chance to think.

This is why deliberately building better teaching habits matters. As James Clear reminds us, “you do not rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems.” (Atomic Habits, 2018) If we want classrooms where everyone is thinking, we need participation systems that make this routine.

Approaches such as instructional coaching help teachers practise and embed high-leverage routines until they become automatic. Over time, these habits reduce cognitive load and free teachers to focus on the complex work of responding to students’ thinking in the moment.

ETA — Everyone, Together, Anyone — provides one such system. Let’s take a closer look at how it works in practice.

Before implementing these strategies, it’s important to work on them deliberately to make them habitual. Only then can you deploy them at the right moment with efficacy. The key idea is that effective teachers move deliberately between these three levels during a lesson, selecting the one that best helps them surface student thinking at that moment.

Below is ⚗️DistillED table breaking down the levels of ETA with clear examples:

Read the three scenarios below and decide which ETA strategy you would deploy to ensure that everyone is involved and thinking:

Scenario 1
In a science lesson, you have just explained the difference between elements, compounds, and mixtures. Before moving on, you want to quickly check whether every student has understood the concept. You display three diagrams on the board and ask:“Which diagram shows a compound?”

👉 Which ETA strategy would you use?

Scenario 2
In a geography lesson, students have just looked at a map showing patterns of population density across the UK. You want them to think about why certain regions are more densely populated than others.

👉 Which ETA strategy would you use?

Scenario 3
In a Year 10 biology lesson, students have just learned about photosynthesis. You ask the class: “Why is sunlight essential for the process of photosynthesis?” You want to hear a clear explanation of the idea and ensure that all students remain mentally engaged as the question is discussed

👉 Which ETA strategy would you use?

Food for thought! Which ETA routine do you rely on most in your classroom? Hit reply and let me know — I always enjoy hearing how teachers are putting these ideas into practice.

Until next week,

— Jamie

If you want more:

👉 Explore the Questioning and Participation CPD resources in the DistillED+ Hub

👉 Read the DistillED edition on Checking for Understanding

👉 Explore the The Attention and Hard Thinking one-page guides

👉 Get the DistillED Playbooks for practical, evidence-informed classroom practices

👉 Read Tom Sherrington’s post on Teaching Some vs Teaching All

ETA Lesson Planning Template
To help you put these ideas into practice immediately, download the Everyone, Together, Anyone (ETA) Lesson Planning Template — a practical one-page resource designed to help you plan where and how you will sample student thinking during a lesson, ensuring participation is deliberate and every student remains cognitively engaged.

This week, ⚗️DistillED+ members get access to an Everyone, Together, Anyone (ETA) CPD PowerPoint and a Printable ETA Classroom Routines Guide, breaking down how to implement mini-whiteboards, paired talk, and cold calling with purpose — so participation routines consistently surface student thinking and ensure everyone is involved in the learning process.