Last week, we looked at cold call, and a few variations of this. We mentioned the significance of wait time: today, it’s a bit of a deep dive into the single most impactful change a classroom teacher can make to their practice.

What is wait time?

Very simply, wait time is the gap between when a teacher poses a question and when they expect a response.

Various studies across the world indicate that wait time, on average, is ever slightly under one second. Think about it: a teacher is expecting students think about, rehearse, verbalise and articulate a response to a question in under a second. Objectively, it seems obvious that the quality of this response is likely to be poor.

It seems plausible that this lack of wait time is a consequence of teachers trying to drive pace in lessons, feeling uncomfortable with silences or, perhaps, using rapid questioning as a mechanism for behaviour management. Whilst all of these things are certainly possible outcomes with reduced wait time, what is compromised is the quality of thinking and the quality of talking. Interestingly, in a classroom in which cold call is the norm, some studies have indicated that wait time actually reduces, placing even more pressure on students to respond very quickly.

As we have covered previously, changing habits in teacher practice is hugely difficult. Increasing the gap between when a question is asked to when an answer is expected by several seconds will have a huge impact on thinking, talking and on academic progress. Teachers need to be intentionally mindful of doing this: one study into live coaching indicated that the most impactful form of coaching came through the teacher coach simply reminding the teacher to wait after each question that they asked.

Wait time and cold call

If a classroom norm has been established in which cold call is expected, wait time becomes even more important.

A further tweak that can make cold call and wait time even more effective is by posing the question, waiting for the appropriate amount of time and then calling on the student to respond.

Habitually, many teachers will operate the other way: they will say the name of the student, then pose the question. The issue with this is that, whilst the classroom environment looks like one in which cold call is operating, actually, the only person who is thinking is the person who has had their name tagged: everyone else is either drifting off or feeling uncomfortable with the silence.

If the question is asked first, then the teacher pauses, everyone is thinking and everyone is preparing their answer. Following this, the named student offers their response and, because all of the others have done their thinking too, this response can be bounced around the classroom - and, as happy chance would have it, bouncing responses is the thing that we are looking at next week!