Wait Time
What was the most valuable lesson you learned during student teaching?
Seriously - try to think of an answer. I’ll wait.
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Got a thought? Ok, great!
Now think about how long it took you to arrive at an answer. How many seconds or minutes did it take?
For some of you, there may have been a notable experience that was burned into your memory and arose in your mind instantly once you finished reading my question.
If you lacked a particularly sensational event to recall, it may have taken a bit longer to come up with a tidbit you learned from your experience.
I’d be willing to bet that many folks will even revise their answers within the next 24-hours, given the luxury of time to space out while driving or watching dishes and remember a better memory from student teaching.
Or the more philosophical amongst you may take even longer to create (hello Bloom’s!) a sophisticated distillation of the lessons gleaned from student teaching - did you seek to learn to teach and instead teach yourself to learn?
The core lesson I took away from student teaching eleven years ago was about the importance of wait time.
After nearly a decade of tech coaching since then, the concept of wait time in its many forms has become an important tool in my toolbox, both professionally and personally.
At the most basic level, my first correction with wait time was pointed out to me by Tim, one of my host teachers. He kindly pointed out to his anxious, fast-talking new teacher protégé that I was giving the homework assignments and then directions for the next activity without pause. Did you know that humans can’t multitask? I did, but when you’re juggling all the things you have to think of when you’re in the front of the classroom you tend to forget nuggets like that. His advice? Students can only do one thing at a time. If you tell them to write down the homework in their agendas, give them uninterrupted time to do it before moving on to the directions for the next activity.
I wrote his observation down on a sticky note to practice action wait time during the rest of my placement - and sitting here a decade later, it is something I still keep in mind when teaching.
When I started my tech coaching job, one of the first trainings I had to attend was APL Effective Teaching. There, I learned about wait time with questioning students. Instead of asking a question and then just cold-calling a napper in the back of the room or a hand-waving-in-the-air-frantically volunteer, I learned to use a different approach to engage the whole class with the question. In a basic sense, you:
Ask your question
Provide a timeframe for how long students have to discuss it with a shoulder partner
Check for understanding (what am I asking you to discuss, how long do you have)
Put students on the clock to discuss the answer with their shoulder partner
While students are talking, move around the classroom, listening to their conversations and participating when necessary. During your observations, make note of students who have the right answer.
At the end of the discussion time, call the class back to attention and call on one of the students who had the right answer.
This process has two key perks:
The student who answers always has the correct answer - avoiding the “I’m a total doofus” feeling you may have experienced by being cold called in class. (One of the other core principles of APL Effective Teaching is: “Make the students look good in front of their classmates.”)
The students have some wait time to think about their answers before being required to respond.
As a tech coach, I use wait time similarly but in one-on-one situations. It is a sorely tempting in-grained habit to want to just tell people every step for how to do tasks on a computer or dictate how to use technology in class for different situations. However, it is an ineffective habit to nurture. What is harder to learn to do, but far more beneficial, is to allow coachees to think of things on their own. Let them look for a button to do what they need before you tell them where it is. (Or hint, “Key buttons tend to be at the top or corners of the page. Let’s look again.”) This helps them be more independent when you aren’t there. Or for more conceptual things, if they come up with ways to use technology in instruction on their own through your questioning and a little assistance, they are more likely to buy into the idea. Don’t we always think our own ideas are the most worthwhile to try? But the wait time is tough. You have to learn to embrace the silence, allow them to struggle (even when they would really like you to just tell them an answer,) and to put yourself in the backseat as they come up with ways to do things that are theirs rather than yours.
Wait time is also important for project idea creation. If I need to come up with an idea, I need to give myself time. For example, when attending my colleague Emily’s MakeyMakey workshop, the participants had to come up with a final project to construct with the MakeyMakey out of cardboard. (MakeyMakey is like a DIY circuit board that you can connect to physical objects and a computer to make different things happen when you complete the circuit. It is super cool.) It took me several minutes of staring into space before I was able to arrive at an idea for what to build. The project was supposed to address a real need in the classroom, so I took a recent spate of first graders’ headphone cables being broken off in their Chromebook’s audio jacks as inspiration and made a giant headphone jack and plug. If someone tried to unplug it crookedly, the circuit would be completed and my code would make an alarm sound.
Just like us, students need time in order to come up with ideas. I was recently watching a recorded conference session video from CUE by Rachel Diephouse - Using Video to Teach The Elements of a Short Story, and she included a student video about how time can help people come up with more creative ideas. (It is a great talk, but the student video shown at 31:35 minutes in can be jumped to via the link here: https://youtu.be/5S-02g84PiY?t=1893) Whether it is a research question for a senior thesis paper, a conflict topic for a story in a video, or a problem to design a cardboard invention to solve, everyone needs wait time to come up with complex ideas.
On a personal level, when looking back at my frustration at making what should have been obvious mistakes while student teaching, I also have learned that I require wait time. It seems like I always want to start something new and be brilliant at it from the get-go, but that nearly never happens. Whether it is learning to teach or learning to drive, it takes the acquisition of lots of knowledge and then lots of seat time to be able to put some routine tasks on autopilot. I’ve learned I need to be kind and have patience with myself when learning new things - eventually we learn to drive between the lines without thinking about it, or the habit of not talking while students are writing. It just takes some wait time to get there.