We have all been there – you ask a question of your students and two hands fly up immediately! The problem is, no more student hands go up after that. How can you receive the essential feedback you need from your students if only a few are participating? Never mind the fact that it is often the same two hands up in all of your lessons. What exactly are you going to do about that?
Use wait time and engage your students like a veteran teacher.
Have you heard of ‘wait time’? Wait time is basically exactly what it sounds like: you ask a question of your students, and you give them some time to think before accepting answers. Officially, wait time is the amount of time that passes between a teacher’s question and the students response. It’s the time you give your students to process information.
Sometimes, you might need to move quickly through a worksheet or process. But, when you are teaching the meat of your lesson, you want all of your students to be engaged and to feel like they are a part of the learning. You want them to feel comfortable enough to raise their hand and share their voice. Part of developing that comfort is up to you, their teacher. An easy way to do it: developing a strategy for utilizing wait time during while group instruction.
Try these 5 strategies to engage your students during your next lesson.
WAIT IT OUT
It’s as easy as it seems. Which is to say, it’s not that easy. The next time you ask a question. Stand there, exposed in front of your class of lovely students, in silence, and count to five in your head before you pick a hand. Now – you might have experienced a bit of brief discomfort during this exercise, but it’s okay, because you may have noticed that in that five seconds, three more students raised their hand. Okay, now what’s next?
GIVE SOME WARNING
Tell your students about your plans to wait it out. Say something like: “I want to give each of you time to think, so I’m going to ask a question and count to 10 in my head. Then, I will invite you to raise your hands!” This strategy does so many things. First of all, it takes the pressure off your students. By giving your kiddos a little time and space to think and formulate their answer, you give them a better opportunity to participate. Second, it puts the pressure on your students!! See what I did there? Sometimes you need to pressure your students to get good results! By giving them time to think, you have raised the expectation of your students. No longer is this a quick process of question and answer. There are questions, there is a lot of thinking, discussion, and learning, then…there is student engagement and participation.
PUT ON YOUR THINKING CAP
Guide your students’ thinking during wait time. If you are giving a lesson on addition problems for example, once you ask your question – or in this case present the problem – give them plenty of time to process and think. The students know there is pressure. What can you do to make them successful? Guide their thinking. Talk out loud through strategies they could be using to solve that addition problem. Say something like: “What are some ways we have learned you can use to add numbers together? Can you use your fingers? Can you count on? Could you draw a picture?” Encourage students to use resources around the classroom during think it out – especially if you have a lot of good anchor charts, classroom posters, or vocabulary walls.
LOOK IT UP
This wait time strategy works beautifully if your students have some type of resource in their hand. For example, let’s say you are doing a shared reading activity using a popular student magazine about recycling. As a pre-reading activity, you could ask your students: “Does anyone know of any materials you can recycle? Many of you might recycle some of these things around your home.” A few hands go up. Now guide students to the resource. Say something like: ”We are going to be learning about recycling today, take a look in your magazine and see if you can find any materials we might be able to recycle.” It’s time to hear their answers – which more students now have because they opened up their magazine and saw pictures of plastic bottles, newspapers, etc. Now, several students who might have already checked out of this magazine activity have an opportunity to raise their hand and feel better about themselves and their learning. It’s happening…
TALK IT OUT
Once you have given waiting it out a try, what can you do to enrich those precious wait time moments? Try a quick turn and talk! Let’s say you are teaching a lesson about the difference between common and proper nouns. You may ask: “Can anyone give me an example of a proper noun?” Instead of calling on a student right away, give it a moment and say something like: “Turn to the person next to you and together, think of a proper noun to share.” Now ask for hands. This will make your shy students more comfortable. It will allow the students who didn’t know an example of a proper noun to raise their hand and participate. The next thing you know, your students are feeling positive and engaged, and your classroom is winning. And it’s all because you implemented a simple strategy called wait time. You are doing this!
Here’s the deal. Student engagement is hard. Sometimes you want to take the easy road and just call on one the first hands that fly up – and that is absolutely okay! You can’t execute teaching strategies to perfection on every lesson and you have a lot to get through in the day. But when you close your classroom door and it’s time to get on top of that shared reading lesson out of your science text, use wait time to maximize that lesson time. Use wait time to make teaching fun for you! Because there is nothing like an engaged classroom full of students – and that’s why you do this! Part of the reason anyway – also because you love hot lunch. Maybe that’s just me.
Have you tried implementing a wait time strategy into your whole group lessons? What was it like?
Happy Teaching!
Elle