Speaking Activities › Hot Seat
Hot seating in character — a questioning activity
One chair, one character, and thirty children with questions. A pupil takes the seat as Neil Armstrong, or a Victorian factory child, or a shark defending sharks in court — and answers whatever the class asks, in role. The quality of this activity is set entirely by the questions, which is exactly why it is worth teaching.
What is hot seating?
Hot seating is a drama technique in which one person sits in role as a character and answers questions from the group as that character. It is used across primary English and history because it does two things at once: it makes the person in the chair inhabit a viewpoint, and it makes everyone else construct a question worth asking.
How do you run it, step by step?
Show the character on the board and give the pupil a moment to settle into it. Take questions from the class for a couple of minutes — hands up, you choose. They answer in role, never as themselves. Then swap. Two or three characters is plenty, because the questions get better as the class warms up.
How do you get better questions?
Ask the class to write one before anyone sits down. The first four questions are always the obvious ones and they get used up in the opening minute, so the child with the interesting question never gets to ask it. Planning first fixes that, and it turns the waiting time into work rather than queueing.
From the classroom
The single change that lifts this activity is to stop taking questions from whoever has their hand up fastest. Have everyone write one question first, then choose — and choose the child who never volunteers, because they have had the same thinking time as everybody else and they usually have something better. The other thing is what you do when the character is stumped. Do not rescue them; ask the class. What do we think she would have said? turns a stall into the most interesting thirty seconds of the lesson, and it makes the point that the character is a shared construction rather than a performance one child has to carry. With a historical figure, one rule saves a lot of trouble: the character may say I do not know, because a Victorian factory child genuinely would not know what happens next, and letting them say so is more honest than making it up.
Which year groups is it for?
It works from Year 2 to Year 9 (US grades 2–8). Younger children do best with a character they already know from a story. Older children can take a historical figure at a difficult moment, and can be pushed to ask questions with no easy answer — what do you wish you had done differently? is worth ten factual ones.
What usually goes wrong?
The answers come back as one word. That is almost never the fault of the child in the chair — it is a closed question, and a closed question gets a closed answer. The other failure is the class asking things the character could not possibly know, which is worth naming as a rule rather than letting it derail the fiction.
Can I print it?
Yes — two sheets. The character cards are numbered cut-outs so groups can run their own hot seats at tables. The question sheet is the one that changes the lesson: question openers, plus space to plan your question and write down what they said.
| Use it for | How | How long |
|---|---|---|
| An English or history starter | One character, two minutes of questions | 10 minutes |
| Before writing in role | Hot seat the character, then write as them | 40 minutes |
| Topic work | Generate characters from the unit you are teaching | 20 minutes |
| Group work at tables | Print the cards, fours, one in the chair at a time | 20 minutes |
Do I need an account?
No. The setup screen and the worked example are both open, so you can see exactly what you would be running, and model it to a class, before anyone asks you for anything. Starting the activity uses a free trial token, and a Sage Pro subscription lifts the limit.
Free to try, and no sign-up to look around.
More speaking activities
There is also a Hot Seating page in Teaching Routines covering the talk structure itself. For more drama, try Speak Like… or Conscience Alley. All seventeen are in Speaking Activities.
Written by a practising primary school teacher, who built Sage Teachers to use in their own classroom. Every activity here is free to try with no sign-up.