Teaching Routines / Hot Seat
Hot Seat
One chair, one character, and a class with questions. The child in the seat has to answer as somebody else — which turns comprehension into something they have to hold in their head rather than look up.
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The sheet it prints — optional
What is hot seating?
Hot seating is a drama-based teaching structure in which one person sits in a chair in front of the class and answers questions in role as a character, while everybody else asks them. It comes from drama teaching and is used most in English and history, though it works anywhere there is a person — real or invented — whose thinking is worth getting at.
What it does that a comprehension exercise cannot is force inference into speech. A child answering as Macbeth has to decide what he would say about something the book never mentions, and that decision is the evidence you are actually after.
How do you run a hot seating activity, step by step?
- Prepare (about three minutes). Everybody writes two questions. Insist they cannot be answered in one word — that single rule does more for the quality than anything else.
- In the seat (about five minutes). One child takes the chair in role. They answer as the character. If they do not know, they invent something the character plausibly would say.
- Swap (about five minutes). A new child, a different character — or the same character at a later point in the story, which is the more interesting version.
Twelve minutes covers two people in the seat. One is not really enough: the second child has watched the first and raises their game, and the class has warmed up.
How do you get children to stay in role?
Give them something to hold. A hat, a scarf, a folded card with the character's name — anything that goes on when they sit down and comes off when they stand up makes the boundary physical rather than a matter of willpower.
The other half is your own questioning. Address them by the character's name from the first second. If you say “so, Sam, what did you think Macbeth was feeling” you have broken the frame yourself, and no child will hold it after that.
The change that made hot seating work in my room was banning questions that start with “did you”. My first attempts died because thirty children asked closed questions — did you feel scared, did you want to run away — and the child in the seat said yes thirty times. Now the question sheet has the stems on it: why did you, what made you, how did you feel when, what would you do differently. The difference is immediate. The other thing I would say is that the first child in the seat should be somebody who will enjoy it, not the child you most want to assess — the first one sets the tone, and if they are stilted the whole class stays stilted. With Year 3 I sit in the seat myself first and let them practise questioning me, which costs five minutes and saves the activity.
What usually goes wrong with hot seating?
- Closed questions. The single biggest failure. Ban “did you” and give question stems.
- The child in the seat answers as themselves. A prop and consistent use of the character's name fix most of this.
- The same six children ask everything. Everybody writing two questions beforehand is the fix, not hands up.
- It becomes a memory test. If every answer is in the book, the activity is a quiz. The good questions are the ones the text does not answer.
Which year groups is hot seating for?
| Year group | US grade | What to change | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| Years 1–2 | K – Grade 1 | You take the seat. They practise asking, not answering. | 8 min |
| Years 3–4 | Grades 2–3 | Children in the seat, with a prop and question stems on the sheet. | 12 min |
| Years 5–6 and up | Grades 4–8 | Two children in the seat as opposing characters, questioned together. | 15 min |
Hot seating compared with the other in-role structures
- Fishbowl also has most of the class watching, but the observers have a job on paper and nobody is in role.
- Step Inside asks every child to write as the character rather than one child to speak as them — less exposing, and it gives you thirty responses instead of one.
- Silent Debate is where to go if the class is not ready to perform in front of each other.
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Written by a practising primary school teacher, and part of the free-to-try Teaching Routines set on Sage Teachers. Last checked August 2026. Everything here is free to try.