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"Build stronger systems. Develop staff capability. Improve student outcomes."
The Doing is the Learning: Opportunities to Respond - Karina Stocker
Opportunities to Respond are much more than a strategy for increasing student engagement. In this episode, Karina Stocker explores how OTRs create repeated opportunities for students to practise academic and behavioural skills, receive feedback, and strengthen learning. Drawing on research and her extensive experience working with schools, Karina provides practical guidance on using OTRs effectively, differentiating support, responding to errors, and using student responses to guide instructional decisions.
Show Notes
Opportunities to respond are more than just engagement
One of the central messages throughout this conversation is that Opportunities to Respond (OTRs) should not simply be viewed as a strategy for keeping students engaged.
Karina explains that learning requires students to actively respond to the content or skill being taught. OTRs create repeated opportunities for students to practise academic and behavioural skills and receive feedback on their performance.
The conversation explores the idea that “the doing is the learning”, and why active student responding is such an important component of effective instruction. Karina also discusses the learn unit and how an instructional cue, student response and teacher feedback combine to create repeated opportunities for learning.
Quantity, quality and choosing the right OTR
While much of the research on OTRs has focused on increasing the rate at which students are provided opportunities to respond, Karina explains why simply asking more questions is not enough.
The discussion explores the quantity and quality of OTRs, the level of academic or behavioural demand, and the importance of matching the type of response to the knowledge or skill being taught.
Karina also explores the different purposes of group and individual responding. Strategies such as choral responding can maximise opportunities for practice, while individual responding provides more precise information about whether a particular student has acquired the skill. Effective instruction involves deliberately combining both.
Differentiation, prompting, and successful responding
A significant focus of the episode is how Opportunities to Respond can be adapted to meet different learning needs within a classroom.
Karina explains how teachers can increase the level of support within an OTR through modelling, prompting and scaffolding, before gradually fading that support as students become more independent. Teachers can also adjust the level of academic demand while maintaining a common learning focus.
The discussion reinforces that differentiation should be responsive to learner performance, providing enough support for successful practise and then systematically reducing that support as the student demonstrates greater independence.
Creating classrooms where students are ready to respond
High rates of Opportunities to Respond rely on students understanding exactly when and how they are expected to participate.
Karina discusses the importance of explicitly teaching response routines and establishing clear and consistent cues so that responding becomes predictable and efficient. Her traffic-light analogy highlights why students benefit from cues that are as clear as red and green, rather than continually having to interpret a new “purple traffic light.”
The conversation also examines cold calling and concerns that individual responding may create anxiety. Rather than using cold calling to catch students out, Karina discusses strategies such as think time, rehearsal, prior group responding and prompting to establish a history of successful participation and make responding feel safe and predictable.
Errors, formative assessment and letting the learner guide instruction
An Opportunity to Respond provides information regardless of whether the student's response is correct or incorrect.
Karina explains why error correction should be brief, neutral and predictable, providing the support required before giving the student another opportunity to respond successfully. Errors become information that helps teachers determine what needs to happen next rather than simply something to be corrected.
This leads into a broader discussion about OTRs as a form of ongoing formative assessment. Student responses help teachers determine whether to provide additional support, fade prompts, reteach or move forward. Karina also discusses acquisition, fluency and generalisation, emphasising that movement through the instructional hierarchy should be determined by learner performance rather than the amount of time a skill has been taught.
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Building OTRs into everyday practice
The episode concludes by considering how teachers and school leaders can strengthen the use of Opportunities to Respond in everyday instruction.
Drawing on implementation science, Karina discusses the importance of clearly defining the practice and building teacher fluency progressively. For teachers, this might begin with recording a familiar lesson, counting their current rate of OTRs and gradually increasing opportunities for students to respond.
From there, teachers can begin incorporating prompts, fading support, strengthening error correction and eventually using OTRs more flexibly for differentiation. Rather than attempting to master every element at once, Karina encourages educators to build the practice progressively until it becomes fluent enough to use flexibly across different learners and contexts.
The conversation finishes with a simple but important message: OTRs are not about asking more questions. They create opportunities for students to practise while simultaneously giving teachers information about whether their instruction is working.
Resources
1. Karina Stocker's Monash Profile
2. Johnson, H. N., Wakeman, S. Y., Rubio, C., & Bong, J. Y. (2026). Beyond the count: An argument for opportunities to respond. Preventing School Failure: Alternative Education for Children and Youth. https://doi.org/10.1080/1045988X.2026.2667521
3. Menzies, H. M., Lane, K. L., Oakes, W. P., & Ennis, R. P. (2017). Increasing students’ opportunities to respond: A strategy for supporting engagement. Intervention in School and Clinic, 52(4), 204–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/1053451216659467
4. The ABCs of OTRs; Corey Peltier's Substack
Contact Karina Stocker
Karina Stocker is an experienced educator, school leader, researcher and education consultant with more than 20 years’ experience in education. A primary-trained teacher, she has worked as a classroom teacher, interventionist, instructional coach and school leader.
Karina is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University, where her research focuses on the implementation of Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) in Australian schools. She also works alongside schools to support the implementation of whole-school MTSS frameworks across literacy and behaviour.
Across her work, Karina is committed to supporting schools to provide equitable, evidence-based education for all students.
Email: karina.stocker1@monash.edu