Teacher Awareness Series I: Article Five

by Jean Schedler, Ph.D. Educational Consultant

Increase “Wait Time” for Student Response

Welcome to the last of five articles focusing on what we as classroom teachers/clinicians can do to increase our awareness of our students’ learning profiles.

If you are just now joining us in the series, it will be critical for you to read the preceding four articles (and practice the suggested techniques) if you are to derive benefit from this article and series.

So far in the series we have:

1)    practiced establishing eye contact with our students;

2)    practiced having the students repeat or summarize their understanding of directions or major points of a lesson;

3)    examined our own teacher language of instruction, and

4)    practiced less teacher talk.

In the previous two articles you were challenged to improve the quality of your language of instruction (teacher talk) while decreasing the quantity of the teacher talk. Teacher talking does not always equate with student learning. If the students are not learning – we are not teaching.

This final recommendation (before going on to the next series of articles) may reap some of your most surprising rewards of this series. The recommendation is to increase the amount of time you wait for a student response once you have posed a question.

Increase the wait time for a student response.

We teachers have an internal stop watch regarding how long we will wait for a response to a question that we pose to a student, before going on to another student for the answer.

If you have eye contact with the student, and have used clear, concise teacher language at the student’s oral language processing level, and are confident the student understands what is being asked – WAIT – Wait just a little longer (5-7 seconds longer) for the student to formulate a response.

 Stop talking while waiting for a student response. Be respectful during the extra wait time you are providing. Some students need extra time to process or formulate a verbal response.

The student(s) may know the answer, but need extra time to organise the information. You may also ask the student the question and then return to him/her a few minutes later for the response.

This way the class discussion can continue, while the student formulates his/her response and then when you return to the student, he/she can join in and contribute to the discussion as well.

You might start by asking different students something about themselves – like what they ate for supper last night. This will give you a sense of how much time different students require to formulate a response.

When you first attempt to identify students that would benefit from extra wait time, be sure you have asked a question that you are confident that the student is able to answer.

If the student clearly does not know the answer, no amount of extra wait time is going to help.

It is exciting to see students gain confidence in their ability to answer questions and join in classroom discussion.

Your challenge this week, is to identify one student in your class or tutorial group(s) for whom a little extra wait time, makes a difference. A student for whom a little extra wait time makes the difference between being able to answer the question, as opposed to missing the opportunity to contribute to the class discussion and show what he knows.

Next week I will be introducing Teacher Awareness Series II – we are not done yet!

Keep practicing in your classroom and sharing your experiences with your fellow teachers.