Early in my career, I learned the magic of wait time. I didn't have a bit of trouble waiting five to ten seconds while allowing more and more students to formulate their responses. I do the same, today, both in my fourth grade classroom and in Bible classes at church. There are also times in performances (where an audience or congregation is not expected to response vocally) when pregnant pauses are effectively used for emphasis. Pausing for emphasis and thought development is often effective to helping students acknowledge that there is something more important than answering: it is the thinking process itself.
Waiting is seldom easy, but it is often very important. Wait time provides students necessary space to process toward an answer, and I found it to be highly effective at causing me to delay my interruptions of student thinking. I learned to wait...and then to wait a little longer...and then to wait beyond my point of discomfort. This effective technique helped my students understand that I had little intention of being the one to provide the answer to the question.
This year, I've discovered that students can "get there" without my intervention. Our Uninterrupted Classwide Conversations have been quite successful, and students have figured out how to comment and respond in turn and with respect.
An awkward pause. My opportunity to provide a rescue. Of course, sometimes the best rescue for a point of dissonance is to leave it unanswered, to continue to let the dissonance ring loudly.
In The Writing on the Classroom Walls, Steve Wyborney helps us understand this:
...Do not insert yourself between the students and the opportunity to face dissonance and challenge. This is the exact point to test you mettle with wait time. That is the point where the students may just discover something much more important and far more powerful than an answer. They may discover a question! Recognize the moment, and put your wait-time mettle to the test. This may be precisely the moment when students begin generating the most important questions. That is a powerful and important experience. Allow it to unfold.
It's always interesting to see which way students will take the conversation.
I want my students to ask:
- What can I do with this?
- How does this make me more powerful?
- What are the opportunities or circumstances that are happening in my life right now that this applies to?
- What do I see clearly now that I didn't even notice before?
