Cold-calling has been proposed as an effective engagement strategy to enhance student participation in whole-class discussions. However, calling on students who did not volunteer can also be understood as a face-threat. The ways in which teachers accomplish cold-calling could prove critical as to how cold-calling is received. The linguistic, interactive, and bodily enactment of cold-calling though has not yet been studied. Drawing on multimodal interaction analysis, this paper aims to examine how actual cold-callings are brought about by teachers and students. Based on a collection of 86 instances of cold-calling recorded in two German middle-schools (grade 5) we analyse the linguistic, interactive, and embodied details of teachers' cold-calling. We show how these serve to frame verbal participation in classroom discourse in two fundamentally different ways: either as collaborative thinking or as a moral obligation. These different enactments of cold-calling are also distinctive with respect to how they position the non-participating students (as more or less competent). Students' interactive responses to the cold-calling suggest that the different enactments are not equally successful in engaging students in cognitively and discursively challenging tasks.