Every classroom I've ever seen (including many in the US and a handful in the UK) has a set of rules posted in a fairly visible location.  The phrasing of these rules may differ from one school to another, but they generally convey the same message: be kind to your classmates, respect adults, try not to hurt people or things, and raise your hand.  Any child who has spent more than a day at school knows that in order to ask questions, answer questions, or share a story about the cupcakes at his sister's birthday, he has to raise his hand.  He may forget this rule when the excitement to share becomes too much to bear, or when the teacher takes way too long to acknowledge the patiently raised hand, but the rule is there and the child knows that hands are for raising.  One school I visited made me question just how universal that last rule might be.

A bit of background before continuing...In most classrooms in the US and the UK, the majority of teacher-student interactions can be described by the Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) model, sounding something like this:
Teacher: How does Ferdinand feel when he gets taken to the bullfight in Madrid?  Pedro?
Pedro: Sad.
Teacher: Good job.
The teacher initiates the interaction by asking a question, waits for the student's response, and assesses the response by using a binary evaluation system of right or wrong (think Wolf Blitzer's "Good thing, bad thing?" on CNN).  Dialogic teaching is an alternative model, in which the teacher's question initiates a dialogue or conversation that gives students opportunities for thoughtful speaking, active listening, and deeper thinking.  Within a dialogic model, this is how the above teaching moment might go:
Teacher: How does Ferdinand feel when he gets taken to the bullfight in Madrid?  Pedro?
Pedro: Sad.
Teacher: Tell us with a complete sentence.
Pedro: Ferdinand feels sad when he goes to the bullfight.
Teacher: Pedro, ask Rachid for a word you might use instead of sad.
Pedro: Rachid, do you have another word?
Rachid: Depressed.
Teacher: Pedro?
Pedro: Ferdinand feels depressed when he goes to the bullfight.
Teacher: What in the story makes you think that?
Pedro: I think that because he has to leave his mom.
Teacher: Now that we have one piece of evidence supporting how Ferdinand feels, turn to your partner and identify two more pieces of evidence...Karly, what evidence did your partner share with you?
Without going into too much detail, let's just say this second interchange is a little different from the first one.

Back to the hand-raising rule.  In Barking and Dagenham, a far outer borough of London, the Peter's Bridge Primary School (name changed) serves a housing estate (British for "the projects") with high levels of deprivation (British for high crime, high poverty, and low educational attainment).  The school population is about half White British and half non-White, with large numbers of relatively recent arrivals from Africa.  Over the past ten years, Peter's Bridge has undertaken significant work to raise student achievement by subtly changing patterns of instruction.  Teachers at Peter's Bridge have largely moved away from IRE instruction and have fully bought into a dialogic approach to teaching.  Because of this, classrooms feel and sound different from a typical elementary school and most of them have this rule, surprising to an outsider, posted just as visibly as the other rules:

This is a No Hands Up School.

The adult will always say the name of the person they would like to speak when they ask a question.

We do not call out; we join in with the conversation.

Remember to wait for a gap.