Hot Seating

Hot Seating is a strategy in which a character or characters, played by the teacher or a student, are interviewed by the rest of the group. This activity invites students to recount a specific event, explore motivation and multiple perspectives/experiences related to a theme, topic, event, character or idea. The traditional approach for using hot seating is for the student playing the character to sit on a chair in front of the class which is arranged in a semi-circle and the class will then ask the student different questions about their character, role in certain events, how they are feeling, why they did something, etc. Because this strategy puts students on the spot, which not a lot of students may be comfortable with, teachers can modify it by having students hot seat in pairs or small groups. This way, students can represent different roles or a group of characters together (e.g. two people involved in a car crash or a group of protestors or refugees). 

Hot seating is a great strategy that teachers can use cross-curricularly to demonstrate and study certain characters in history or in books, events, topics, or themes. For example, students in the junior grades may study social studies and important people in history. They could then do research on a significant character related to a topic studied in class and then engage in a hot-seating activity with the other students to help them learn more about this person. Furthermore, students in older grades can pair up and find individuals with opposing views, each student studies their character, and then they can engage in hot seating together in the form of a debate. 

Hot seating is a great way for all students to build on their critical thinking, questioning, and communication skills. An important thing to remember about hot seating is to not focus as much on the facts, but to rather concentrate on personal feelings or observations noted.