Technique 33: Wait time - Building ratio through questioning

Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 33: Wait time
Building ratio through questioning

After asking a question of his class, the typical teacher waits about a second before taking an answer. The challenges and limitations posed by such a habit are significant. The answers the teacher can expect to get after less than a second's reflection are unlikely to be the richest, the most reflective, or the most developed his students can generate. And taking answers after just a second has the effect of systematically encouraging students to raise their hands with the first answer they think of, rather than the best answer. If students wait any longer, someone else will have answered. What's more, taking immediate answers makes it more likely that the teacher will waste time. He will likely have to respond to a poorer answer before he gets a good one. A bit of waiting can often save you time in the end, as it ensures that you start with higher-quality initial answers.

Wait Time is the practice of inserting a short amount of waiting—often just a fraction of a second—before taking an answer. Under ideal circumstances, what happens during Wait Time is thinking, so it's a powerful tool for increasing Think Ratio.

The benefits of waiting a few seconds between question and answer include:

· Allowing more hands to go up

· Enabling a wider range of scholars to raise their hands

· Supporting better, more rigorous answers

· Prompting more cognitive work during the “wait”

· Increasing use of evidence in answers

You can see a great example of Wait Time in the video Maggie Johnson: Focus on Why from an eighth-grade English class at Troy Prep Middle School. The class is discussing To Kill a Mockingbird, and the clip begins as Maggie follows up on some writing she's asked her students to do. “As I walked around, [I noticed] many of you were able to tell me what the difference in opinion is between Aunt Alexandra and Atticus on Calpurnia,” Maggie says. “The question is, why?”

After about a second (the amount of time a typical teacher waits), there's just one hand in the air. So Maggie waits. After three seconds or so, perhaps eight more students have raised their hands. Just a second or two of additional reflection time, and a spate of students enthusiastically offer to participate, having realized they have some insight on the matter. Her smile and the playful way she raises her eyebrows diffuses any awkwardness. In another few seconds a few more hands go up, these a bit more tentative. This is especially interesting: the last group of students who've raised their hands seem as though they weren't at first sure they wanted to risk it, but have decided to after all. In many ways, these are exactly the kids you want raising their hands, and it's exciting to see the courage that a few seconds will evoke.

In the end, Maggie gives, by my count, eight seconds of Wait Time before she calls on Jaya to answer. As a result, she has better choices: a dozen kids who've thought through an answer. If the first student’s answer needs developing she has lots of students she can call on. And they’re likely to have more thoughtful answers than what she'd have likely gotten from the student whose hand went up as soon as Maggie stopped talking.

For her next question, Maggie gives almost thirteen seconds of Wait Time. Again, you can see students starting to raise their hands, slowly, thoughtfully. Note the girl in the front row towards the right who starts to raise her hand, puts it down, and then slowly raises it again. She's wrestling, apparently, with whether to try to join in or not. Perhaps she's wondering whether she should risk it. Perhaps she's wondering whether her answer is solid enough yet. But the extra time allows her to overcome her doubts or refine her answer. She opts in. At the same time, several students are using the time to scan the book for useful insights, a fact made evident by Maggie's narration.

A similar process plays out again in the seven seconds of Wait Time that Maggie offers in response to her third question: “What does Atticus say about mockingbirds again?” What's striking here are the high levels of participation, enthusiasm, and reflection among Maggie's students. They love the book, are invested in it, and so are thinking deeply. Or is it the other way around? Do they love and feel investment in the book because she's caused them to reflect deeply on it?

Implementing Wait Time can be challenging. It is hard to discipline yourself to allow time to pass after a question, and it takes a bit of practice. Making a habit of silently counting to three in your head or narrating your intention to wait (for example, “I'll give you a few seconds … OK, let's see what you have to say”) can help.

Even so, there's no guarantee that students will use Wait Time to think. To confound the issue, it's hard to assess what students do with the time you give. It may not necessarily be apparent to students how they should respond to your waiting. What this tells us is that there are steps necessary to teach, remind, and acculturate your students to use Wait Time effectively and ensure it is as productive as it can be.

Step 1: Narrate Hands

As I discussed earlier, students are more likely to think productively about a question if they expect to answer it. The degree to which students think during Wait Time is in part a function of their expectations about what's going to happen next. If students expect to use the ideas they generate, they are likely to put Wait Time to good use. Cold Calling, the technique I will come to next, is one way to address this—it makes it possible that anyone might be called on and so socializes readiness and engagement during time allotted for thinking. But being Cold Called is far from a surety and even better and more reliable, is students' own expectations of their likely actions. A student who thinks, “I seek to raise my hand” is a student who does the thinking. If students believe that what one does after time spent thinking is to offer to share ideas, if they expect to raise their hands, they have internalized a belief that causes them to engage in active thinking. The correlation is imperfect, of course, but if the expectation—I will probably raise my hand—becomes the norm, optimal thinking is likely to as well.

Sadly though, there are a great many classrooms where hands in the air are infrequent or limited to a few students, and where nonparticipation is a matter of course, sometimes a norm. In such classrooms, Wait Time will be less effective and the ratio will be lower. If the productivity of the Wait Time is influenced by the likelihood of a hand being raised afterwards, one productive move, especially early in the year, is to encourage, foster, and socialize hand-raising by narrating hands.

Let's say you ask, “What was the purpose of the first Continental Congress?” Maybe one or two students raise their hands. Others sit passively. Most students, probably, are engaged in a subtle and silent calculus: Is the teacher really expecting us all to raise our hands? Your first goal is to build a norm, the expectation that most of the class probably will. You can do this by “elevating its visibility,” Peps McCrea points out, by increasing an action’s “profusion” (the portion of students who do it) and its “prominence”—how much people notice the behavior and believe that you value it. “One hand,” you say out loud. “Two hands. Now three.” You are building momentum. Perhaps a fence-sitter, a student who had something they might offer but who was warily reading the classroom norm, now raises her hand. “Four hands,” you say, smiling, relaxed, not rushed. You want hands but especially hands of students who have taken their time. “Five,” you say. “Thank you, Kesha. Thanks, Lance. Nice. Now I'm starting to see those hands.”

Your message is: I notice and I care when you raise your hand and, increasingly, many of your classmates are doing it.

In the video Josefina Maino: I Need More Hands, you can see Josefina narrating the hand-raising in her math classroom at Astoreca School in Santiago, Chile. “What does it mean that an inequality has a ’set of solutions’?” she asks. Here's the scene, after she's allowed perhaps four or five seconds of wait time:

Photo depicts a few of the students raising their hands in a class room.

It's typical of classrooms everywhere. Four hands are raised: enough for her to be able to find someone to call on. Over the course of the lesson, four or five hands means it won't be as awkward as when it's just two kids. She can teach under these conditions. Many teachers do.

But it's worth asking: How many of those students sitting with their hands down are thinking? How many are answering the question? Could Josefina build a culture in which they were expected to engage and thus thought more actively about things, like what we mean by a set of solutions to an inequality?

Yes, she could, as we soon see. She starts merely counting hands, making it clear that she's values breadth of participation. Just the act of counting hands out loud encourages more volunteering. She gets easily to twelve. She asks for sixteen volunteers as a minimum. Thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen go a little slower. Alonzo's is the sixteenth hand. Josefina thanks him. And calls on him. He was hesitant and she wants, now, to make him feel successful, to cause him to persist in this new behavior of hand-raising that he's embraced.

She walks towards him, repeating the question to make sure he remembers it, but also making the connection feel more personal. It's a bit of Warm/Strict (technique 61), too—she reminds him nonverbally to answer in a complete sentence (Format Matters, technique 18)—and that’s the gesture she's making.

When Alonso rises to the occasion, the handshake from Josefina and the snaps of support from the class are beautiful—and encourage everyone in class to be hand-raisers as well.

There are lots of wrinkles you could add to the approach here to emphasize and value different things. For example, if you're trying to socialize risk-taking and encourage students to be comfortable raising their hands for hard questions or when they're not sure they're right, you might say, “Now I'm starting to see those brave hands.” Or you might say, “I especially love it when students raise their hand when they aren't sure. That shows me fearlessness.” You might signal to students that you aren't expecting a polished, final response: “This is a really tricky one. I'm curious about your initial reactions. Get us started and we'll work through it together.”

Or you could slow your cadence and be double-calm. “Two hands. Three hands. Take your time but push yourself to share.”

Or instead of counting you could just verbalize appreciation. “Thanks, Jeremy, for raising your hand. Thanks, Jasmine. Thanks, Carlos. Gonna give other folks a few more seconds.”

If you're still not getting enough hands, keep at it. Norms and expectations won't change all at once. But you can also be ready with a few backstops, like saying “Hmmm. A lot of us seem unsure. Twenty seconds to discuss with your partner. Go.” You might even tell your students to put their hands down. “I want you all to take fifteen seconds and go back to the text and find the answer. I want to see everyone rereading, and I'll tell you when you can raise your hands.” After fifteen or twenty seconds, you might say, “OK, now, hands!”

Or perhaps, “Hmmm. Surprised to see so few hands. Mark, tell us as much as you think you know.” That's a Cold Call, as you probably know, but a pretty supportive one. And if Mark doesn't have his hand raised but some students do, it communicates that all students in the room are part of the conversation, whether or not they've raised their hands. Reluctant students might as well get in on the game. You'd be using a bit of loving accountability to support the gentle encouragement. Together they are likely to make a difference.

The video Aidan Thomas: Wait Time Montage shows a compendium of Aidan's narrating hands techniques. You can see how his energy is always positive and how he varies his approach but is constantly at it throughout this class period. He's building a culture of hand-raising.

Step 2: Prompt Thinking Skills

Once you've normalized and reinforced the expectation of hand-raising, another productive action to get the most out of Wait Time is to prompt thinking skills. This is a step by which you teach students how to make Wait Time useful by providing guidance about how to use their three or five or twelve seconds to be most productive. For example:

· “I'm seeing people thinking deeply and jotting down thoughts. I'll give everyone a few more seconds to do that.”

· “I'm seeing people going back to the chapter to see if they can find the scene. That seems like a great idea.”

· “I'm hoping someone will be able to connect this scene to another play, ideally Macbeth.”

· “I'm going to give everyone lots of time because this question is tricky. Your first answer may not be the best.”

It's an assumption that students know they can and should do things like this in the brief periods of time you provide for thinking, in other words. In each of these cases, the teacher is explaining things that, as expert learners, we know are productive actions. They can be pragmatic—to jot down ideas, check your notes, or glance back through the text—or more abstract: to think about broader connections or to double-check your first thought. Knowing how to use such actions starts with being aware of them.

About a minute into the video Akilah Bond: Keystone, Akilah asks, “How did Cam help Eric find the note?” She reminds a few students to put their hands down to ensure that they use their Wait Time and then, pointing to the notes of the class' earlier discussion, notes, “Imani's looking at what we know about the characters. Nice move.” The purpose of the notes is to reinforce students’ memory of key moments in the story. Just the kind of thing that's obvious to adults but not to second graders, perhaps, so Akilah is reinforcing that it's the ideal thing to review to help their thinking. Between that and reminding them to put their hands down and take their time, she's teaching them how to use Wait Time when they get it.

Step 3: Make Wait Time Transparent

When you intend to give students more than a handful of seconds of Wait Time, it's helpful to make that fact explicit to them so that they can manage their actions accordingly, especially as they get better and better at using Wait Time to build ideas. Doubly so, if you are giving them longer stretches of Wait Time.

Let's say I'm a student in your class and you ask a rigorous question, something like, “What political forces pulled the border states toward the Confederacy, and how did Lincoln respond to them?” You give the class some Wait Time, and I start to reflect. After about five seconds, I've come up with a few nascent ideas—I'm ready to be called on—and I begin to wind down my thinking.

But let's say you were hoping for something a little more robust—you were hoping I'd be ready to cite a few specific incidents and describe how they connect, and you'd decided to give the class twenty or thirty seconds of Wait Time to make sure we thought deeply. I'd be more likely to meet your expectations if you made your intentions transparent by saying something like, “This is a hard question. It requires you to reflect on multiple factors. I'll give you thirty seconds or so.”

Now I can gauge my thinking accordingly. I would start off understanding that this was no throwaway moment and would persist in reflecting because you'd told me about how much Wait Time to expect. If not, you might give me thirty seconds to think only to have me not use it, simply because I didn't know you were going to give it to me.

Step 4: Give Real Think Time

The fourth step is simple: stop talking. This is critical because the first steps require you to narrate things and interrupt student thinking. This must be balanced with real think time, which, because it requires inaction, can be hard to remember to provide. Counting silently to yourself can help you build the necessary habit of self-discipline. You might also walk around your room as you wait, with the goal of waiting until you reach a specific spot on the other side of the room before you call on someone. Or you might use the clock to your advantage, saying, “I'll call on someone in ten seconds,” and forcing yourself to wait until the second hand releases you. After the socializing of hand-raising and the praising, remember that this is the most important part: there has to be some time when no one is talking, when students are thinking. By your silence, you are intimating that this is as important as anything they will do all day.