Latest / New Teacher Talk / Ep 185: Wait Time 2: The Research-Based Strategy That Transforms Classroom Discussion with Dr. Monica Boehle

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Ep 185: Wait Time 2: The Research-Based Strategy That Transforms Classroom Discussion with Dr. Monica Boehle · New Teacher Talk

My name is Dr.
Monica Boehle,
and I'm the Associate Director of High School Curriculum in
St.
Charles, Illinois.
I'm a former instructional coach,
I'm a National Board Certified Social Studies teacher,
and I love all things education.
Today,
I'm gonna talk to you about a topic called wait time two.
So let's start at the beginning.
What is wait time?
Wait time refers to practices where the teacher,
the instructor, just deliberately pause.
Wait time one is after you pose a question, you wait.
One, two, three.
It's the pause between asking the question and getting the
answer.
This demonstrates that the question is not rhetorical,
it presumes that all kids at least think about what's being
asked and realize that perhaps a question was asked.
I recorded a previous podcast about wait time one.
Ask a question, wait.
That episode is worth a listen,
so consider how to add that pause into your speaking.
But today's episode is about wait time two.
Wait time two is actually used after the answer is
provided.
So it goes like this.
Ask a question, one, two, three.
Get a student response and then one, two, three.
You wait, you wait after the response.
This time provides students with time to think,
try to think about how they might respond to their peer,
what they might add to their answer and try to get a little
bit more thoughtful and dig deeper into what they wanna
say.
While this deliberate pause sounds super simple,
it's really actually quite difficult.
As teachers, we really resist silence in the classroom.
We find it really difficult.
And as somebody from the Midwest, I talk fast,
I think fast, I respond quickly.
I want to show somebody that I'm listening so I start
talking or as they're talking,
I'm thinking about what I'm gonna say.
And all of that is what we're trying to stop.
It is different than the kind of questioning that we refer
to as the I-R-E.
The I-R-E is the teacher interrogates by posing a question,
a student responds and the teacher evaluates the response.
What color is the sky?
The sky is blue, good.
Boom, boom, boom.
The teacher is dominating the conversation.
The key here is to avoid asking students to produce a
response that matches a predetermined question.
Well,
that might be necessary like you're reviewing some basic
like fluency type things or some lower level questions to
review.
We're talking about those higher level conversations that
dig at conceptual knowledge where kids are trying to think
about divergent answers.
So why is this important?
Now,
I actually am gonna contextualize this episode with a little
bit of research.
I love research so much and it challenged me to think about
my own practice.
With people newer to education,
I like to validate the practices that are supported by
research so we can invest in them and we can dismiss less
effective strategies.
So what do we know?
We know from research that in grades six through 12,
teachers talk somewhere between 70 and 80% of class time on
average.
There have been studies that show that in a given day,
it is possible that a student doesn't speak at all in any
of the classes.
John Hattie,
who is famous for developing his visible learning where he
ranks influences by analyzing meta studies and meta
analysis,
he looks at the effect size of different types of instructional
methods.
And there are four that land in a very high effect size and
that is classroom discussion, elaboration,
self-verbalization and questioning.
If we know that learners need to do 70% of the talking and
30% of the listening and teachers are talking 70% of the
time, guess who's doing the learning?
One of my colleagues used to say this a lot when I worked
with her,
the person doing the talking is the person doing the
learning.
And so the learners must be center stage.
This cannot happen when you are doing most of the talking
and most of the leading in the questioning.
So wait time to slows it down and provides the space for
the students to talk.
So what else can I do?
I want to also connect this to something called dialogic
teaching.
And this is about ongoing talk between teachers and
students, not just teacher presentation.
So how does wait time relate to this?
If we know those who are doing the talking are doing the
learning,
this helps them really think about who are they talking to?
Often when a teacher poses a question,
the student is answering to the teacher.
So that means that you are having as the teacher,
lots of mini conversations with lots of individual students
in it at an audience.
There is not really an expectation that students listen to
each other.
And so when we talk about wait time to it builds in an
opportunity for students to start thinking about what other
students are saying.
And that's where we start to get to dialogic teaching.
It's the ongoing conversation as a group, as a class.
When we provide that wait time to we know that there are
studies there's one by year and Hattie in the year 2000
also related to visible learning that we see higher quality
answers.
There's more thoughtfulness, there's more detail.
It increases the participation,
especially for quieter students.
And even though it slows down instruction,
it actually creates a more efficient lesson because you can
spend more time on the most important things.
So you wait, the student responds,
and you just let that response settle over the class.
A lot of times the students will add to their answer.
That's what we want.
Sometimes other students will respond to their answer.
One phrase I've used with my students before is let's
admire that response.
So it's sometimes awkward with the quietness.
So you can have some prompting questions.
You want to get away from the what questions and get to the
how questions and the why questions.
How did you do that?
How did you get to that response?
Why did you do it that way?
And once we start moving away from what to how and why,
the responses become more complex and they can reason
through it.
This also encourages the active listening.
One other really great benefit of wait time to this
incredibly simple device is actually about social emotional
learning and belonging.
If students have realized that they're going to be listened
to, it makes them feel valued.
It can kind of change our beliefs about students because
what wait time actually is,
is thinking time and processing time.
We know that when teachers ask students question,
they typically wait less than a second for a response.
That's such an incredibly fast processing time.
So let's put that in the context of a multilingual learner
or a learner with special needs or struggling students who
need time to process and respond and we keep the pace of
class too fast.
The more wait time we give,
the more we're able to see what every student can do.
So what are the students doing?
This is where they start listening to each other.
Maybe they build on a response,
maybe they challenge a response,
but we do see positive outcomes from this relatively
straightforward strategy.
And this is where they develop the thinking, reasoning,
and language skills so they figure out how their response
is really formulated.
So ultimately, when in education,
we talk about accountability and that we want students to
be accountable to their learning,
wait time is about that accountability.
They're doing what you're asking them to do.
All this thinking is that thinking about accountability.
It builds the SEL.
It's builds the community and it really helps show the
power of your students.
So let's talk about how to do it because again,
you got to live with a little bit of awkwardness here.
First of all, you need to ask good questions,
pose the questions.
There are some times when you have to do like the rapid
response,
but this is when we're really engaged with tough thinking
that we really want kids to process through.
As a teacher, you want to be neutral, non-committal,
and you want to be warm to keep the flow going.
So you want to be encouraging, but do not praise.
That's the key here.
You're not saying you're right or good.
You're really looking for them to add to their answer.
So how long should you wait?
This kind of depends on the complexity of the question,
the ability of the students,
and really what you're trying to get at with the clarity of
that question.
Remember,
lower level questions will take most students one to three
seconds to answer.
Questions that require that complex thinking generate need
at least four to six seconds.
Higher order questions may even be longer to formulate that
reply.
Now, remember,
we do have to kind of be explicit to our students that this
is what we're attempting to do.
And so with that encouragement of,
I do want you to jump in,
or I do want you to affirm each other and challenge and
support and build, that's gonna help build that culture.
But you might find that you might need a few prompting
questions.
Can you explain that in another way?
What do you mean by that?
What makes you say that?
One of my favorites is just the neutral,
can you tell me more?
Sometimes the teacher is really skilled at doing the mm-hmm
with a head nod,
where it encourages the student to just keep talking.
Students may not always be able to add to their answer.
Maybe they're still in a processing stage,
but wait time two is an opportunity that we're giving them
the space to occupy to really get to a response.
Slow down that pace of instruction.
Instead of going at that fast pace,
this encourages student participation and encourages that
discourse.
So wait after the student response.
That's wait time two.
Emphasize that we are engaging with each other's ideas and
contributions rather than always the instructor.
So why use wait time two?
It's actually very easy.
There's no prep that you really need besides having some
good questions.
It is a little harder to implement,
especially recognizing the cognitive load of teaching.
There's a high payoff for many types of learners,
and it builds that classroom environment,
demonstrating that active listening.
So give it a try.
Wait time two.
Can't wait to hear about the success that you have with
your students.
Signing off for today, this is Dr.
Monica Bailey.
Thanks for listening to today's New Teacher Talk episode.
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