Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The art of wait time

I have blogged about the importance of questioning here:
Just as asking a certain type of question is important, we must also allow for sufficient wait time to occur to give a student a chance to think and answer the question.
When I first started asking higher level questions in my class, my students appeared as if I had I just delivered them a dose of shock therapy.  I never realized that it was going to take some time for my students to adjust from answer YES/NO to giving me more in depth solutions.  Once the class had adjusted (which took weeks, not days), I still had to wait on my “Wait-time I” and “wait-time II”.
Wait-time I: the time that teachers wait after having asked a question to receive an answer… three seconds here, feels like an hour!
Wait time II: the time that a teacher waits after a student has answered a question.
When you increase both of these times, with wait-time I being at least 3 seconds, the research (Rowe, 1974a, 1974b, Rowe, 1986) states you will witness the following outcomes:
·         The length of student responses increases by 700%
·         The number of unsolicited, but appropriate, student response increases;
·         Failures of students to respond decreases;
·         Students’ confidence, as reflected in decrease of inflected responses, increases;
·         The incidence of speculative student responses increases;
·         More students inferences are supported by evidence and logical argument;
·         The incidence of student-student comparisons of data increases;
·         The number of student questions and proposed experiments increases; and
·         The incidence of responses from students rated by teachers as relatively slow increases.
It is troublesome for some teachers to wait for 3 seconds, but I encourage you to try it!
If you have ever waited 3 seconds after asking a question, before receiving an answer, you will understand how long this feels.  However, the price we pay for waiting 3 seconds is more valuable to learning than you answering your own questions for an hour.

3 comments:

  1. Wait time is one of the first things I address with student teachers.

    And it gets worse for those teachers who teach the same course content multiple times in a day. It's pretty easy to become a content delivery technician and forget that your suppose to be teaching kids.

    Great post!

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  2. This is so important! On days that I'm antsy, I'll mentally count. I've heard of people putting a rubber band on their wrist and popping themselves to help them with this. Whatever works. Thanks for the outcomes, too.

    Wait time was one of my comfort questions I just wrote about on 10 Teaching Questions to Make You Comfortably Uncomfortable.

    Thanks for sharing.

    - @newfirewithin

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  3. I think I do a pretty good job with wait time 1, but I know I have a far way to go on wait time 2. In science class, I think I want to reassure them so quickly that they are correct...so I jump right in. But, my goodness, I really see potential in giving that time after. I even cringe a bit when I go too quickly and cut a student off. I've had to apologize at times because of my enthusiasm.

    Thank you for writing on this. It is good to reflect on how much time I give.
    My next area to focus on!

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