My first observation as a teacher was done by my university advisor. She had a lot of good thoughts and constructive criticism, but the best was about wait time. Professor Klehm said, "You are not waiting long enough after you ask a question. Count to three before you start looking for hands."
Observers and feedback givers, take note. This is the kind of effective, practical, simple, and usable advice every first year teacher needs. And the longer I taught, the more I recognized how right she was. In fact, she probably should have told me to count to a higher number.
Increasing wait time would improve all of our classrooms because wait time is think time.
Imagine. You are sitting in a class or a meeting. The leader asks a question. Your ears hear it, but it takes a moment for it to be really heard by your brain. Then, unless it is a question you get asked frequently and have a memorized response for, it takes a little time to consider what the answer might be. How long do you think that process might take? What if the meeting leader expected an answer from you in less than a second? Or less than half of a second? Stressful, right!?!
Well, here's the bad news.
In data compiled from thousands of teacher observations, the average wait time between a K-12 teacher asking a question and then expecting students to answer, has been calculated to be 0.7s. If that's the average, that means some teachers are waiting for less than half a second before expecting kids to have an answer. Some were as low as 0.2 seconds! Just for context, it took 0.155s for Usain Bolt to get out of the blocks after the starting gun was fired at the Rio Olympics. So, some teachers are expecting Olympic sprinter thinking from middle schoolers.
Then, they call on the first student to raise their hand, and thinking stops for the rest of the class. The gap just keeps getting wider as the fastest thinker is the only one engaging in retrieval practice and those who need it most don't get the time to do it.
Why is this happening?
Well, for one thing, many education preparation programs don't cover this type of practical classroom technique stuff. There is a lot of high level philosophy talk about "your why." That's important, don't get me wrong, but how much time does it take you to find it? There's a lot of Piaget and Maslow. I guess, if that's your thing, there's nothing wrong with learning it, but I've never thought about either of those mend during an actual teaching day. There's a lot of talk about "the direction education is heading" even though it never is because it keeps changing direction. The stuff you need in the daily practice of education is given short time, if any at all. I moved into a new school building with six science teachers, and not one of us had been taught how to store chemicals safely in the stock room, so you can be certain a small but practical and impactful detail, like wait time, wasn't ever mentioned. So, teachers don't know. That is one reason.
Another reason is a thing your brain does, known as "action bias." If there is activity, your brain reasons that you must be making progress. You have fallen victim to this if you have ever been sitting at a lengthy red light and made the decision to turn and take a much longer route to your destination rather than sit there for another 30 seconds. Activity feels more productive, so when we are calling on students quickly, it feels like our classroom is more productive.
The "curse of expertise" may play a role here as well. Since I know the material well, I could answer this question very quickly, so I assume my students can as well. It's easy to forget that novices think differently than experts. It will, of course, take more time for them to even understand the question than it will for a group of experts, much less the amount of time it takes to develop an answer. That's at play with a lot of recent graduates (you just took a physics course way harder than the one you are teaching) and experienced teachers (your content is second nature to you at this point).
For me, personally, it was discomfort with silence. Most of us find more than a couple of seconds of silence awkward, especially when there are people looking at us. So teachers tend to fill the silence with chatter. Even when I was getting better with waiting for the kids answers, I was saying more stuff and filling their working memories. I started keeping a water bottle on the cart next to me so I could take a drink while I was waiting for them to think because it was the only way to shut myself up. Eventually, I learned to embrace the awkwardness, even taking pride in the fact that I could endure it longer than they could until someone finally answered.
The good news
That was the bad news. The good news is that this extraordinarily easy to fix. You literally just wait longer. The advice given to me to count to three inside my head was good. I would make it five, though, because most of us count faster than we think we do. Grab a sip of water; tap five times on your leg, scan the room, whatever you need to do. Let your students know that you aren't going to call on someone just because they are the first person to raise their hand and that you want them all to have a chance to process their thoughts; they get it and the slower processors appreciate it.
What time is right?
What is the right amount of wait time? There's not a clear answer on that. It largely depends on the complexity of the question and the exposure your students have already had with the content. If you have been sprinkling retrieval practice questions through out the chapter, and you are asking relatively simple questions on the day before the test, you will not need to wait as long as you would if you are asking a complex question on a new topic.
What has been observed by researchers, if you want some guidance, is that in classrooms where 3-5 seconds wait time is practiced, there are more correct responses and more variety of responses. The variety part interests me because some of those answers will be wrong (others will be a variation of right if the question is open), but they are answer that wouldn't even have been proposed with less than three seconds of wait time. You can't fix misconceptions you don't know they have, so getting a wrong answer from a student is useful to you as a teacher because you have insight into their thinking.
I don't want you to misread this as an endorsement of a glacial classroom pace. Brisk pacing is a good thing. Too much idle time is how teachers lose control of their classrooms. I am only address the time between questions and responses here, not the rest of your lesson.
I know we are at the end of the year here. You may only have a few days or a couple of weeks left, so you might just experiment with this while reviewing for exams. But keep it in mind when the school year starts next year. While you are going over your classroom procedures, explain that you value their thinking time and then practice waiting. The benefits outweigh the awekwardness.
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