ABSTRACT
Signal, for flow. Students are being asked to move as a group from one question, one response, one activity, one segment to another. These transitions can be accomplished by an agreed-upon set of transactional cues. In the elementary grades, especially but not exclusively, students and teachers can cue the shifts with hand signals. Also, hand signals can indicate modes of response, types of questions, degree of understanding. Imagine an engaged classroom in which students signal the types of thinking they or others are using, their agreement or disagreement, their understanding or lack thereof, their readiness to move on, the strategy they are using within cooperative learning groups. Imagine also the teacher signaling for the requested response mode as with Think-Pair-Share and with a multimodality spelling test. Transactional and substantive sign language (see Glossary and Appendix Figure A.19) as a signaling system is a key element in an engaged, Every-Student-Response classroom.
