1. Q uality uestioning Materials adapted from QUILT curriculum:
Henrico County
Public Schools
Welcome to the Quality Questioning Professional Development Workshop. You are participating in a workshop designed to address a Henrico county initiative. We have adapted the QUILT curriculum to address the needs of the Henrico division and we call our initiative Quality Questioning.
Today we are providing a brief overview of a piece of the Quality Questioning curriculum - Wait Time.
Most teachers have heard about Wait Time and may be familiar with the differences between Wait Time I and II. Teacher report that consistent implementation of Wait Time is very challenging. So what we will learn today is not necessarily NEW content. Rather, today we will explore the reasoning behind the use of Wait Time and strategies that will help us close the gap between what we know and what we do.
Materials adapted from QUILT curriculum:
Questioning and Understanding to Improve Learning and Thinking

2. Focus Questions: What are Wait Time I and II?
What are the benefits of using Wait Time I and II?
Most of you know about Wait Time (also called Think Time).
How long is that exactly? How do you know how long to wait? Can you wait too long?
It depends on your students and what you intend they get out of the questioning process.
Let’s take a little deeper look at why we want to wait…

3. Why Wait?
To become skilled in prompting, we must first recognize that student responding is usually not a simple, automatic, or one-step process. Rather, at least four steps are involved in a student response.

4. Why Wait? Listen to the question Students must:
First, a student must attend to—or listen to—the question.
Listen to the question
Students must:

5. Understand what is being asked
Why Wait?
Understand what is being asked
Next, the student must be able to decipher the question. The student must understand the question in order to decide the kind of answer the question is seeking. The more complex the question, the longer this step may take.
Listen to the question
Students must:

6. Understand what is being asked
Why Wait?
Answer to self
Understand what is being asked
Third, the student answers the question silently—to herself or himself.
Listen to the question
Students must:

7. Understand what is being asked
Why Wait?
Answer out loud
Answer to self
Understand what is being asked
Finally, the student is in a position to answer the question out loud.
How long do we usually allow for students to go through these four steps?
(Pose this question to participants and allow at least three to five seconds of wait time. The expected response is one second or less.)
How long do you think the average person would require?
(Call on a participant immediately. Expect an immediate response; if this is not forthcoming, move right on to another. Go back to the first participant and ask how he/she felt when rushed. Now ask participants to speculate on what might constitute a reasonable amount of time for these tasks.)
Listen to the question
Students must:

8. Wait Time I: The length of time a teacher pauses after asking a question.
This pausing has a special name in the literature of questioning: Wait Time I, which is defined above for you.
The most comprehensive research on teacher behaviors regarding pausing (or not) after questioning has been conducted by Mary Budd Rowe, a science educator and researcher at the University of Florida. What Dr. Rowe found, following observations in dozens of science classrooms, was that the typical teacher waits an average of one second or less for a student to answer before moving to another student. Further, she found that when teachers waited on the average of three to five seconds, tremendous benefits accrued to both students and teachers. You will have an opportunity to examine and analyze the many benefits Rowe found to be associated with Wait Time I in a subsequent activity. For now, would you please think back to those times (in our session today) when I waited for your responses. What happened?
Note: Use Wait Time I even as you pose this question. Invite participants to speculate on what occurs: they all come up with an answer, responses seem to be better and longer, etc.
Based on what we’ve already said about student responding, what occurs when we do not wait the requisite time for a student response?
Possible answers include low achievers don’t respond, teacher communicates that he/she wants the answer immediately, etc.

9. Wait Time II: The length of time the teacher pauses after the student response before speaking again.
Wait Time 2 provides time for:
student to refine thinking
Add to response for completeness
change response
Other students in the class to think about response and prepare to agree or disagree
Other students to think of example or evidence that supports or negates response.
Teacher to think about scaffolding or next question.

10. Wait Time Patterns: Wait Time 1 Wait Time 2 ? by Teacher Student
Responses
Teacher
Reaction P A U S E P A U S E
Wait Time Patterns
Mary Budd Rowe and her colleagues found that students do not always have a complete response in mind when they begin talking. Rather, as this diagram depicts, student talk comes in bursts. When allowed time, students tend to add to their initial response in ways that make it more complete and, usually, bring it to higher cognitive levels.
Talk by students
comes
in bursts

11. Research Patterns
Rowe’s findings are summarized here. (We have already explored reasons for this rapid pacing - discussion of research.)
- Teachers pace instruction at a rapid rate.
- The average teacher waits less than a second for a response after asking a question. - The time that a teacher pauses after a pupil responds is usually shorter than after a question.
BUT!

12. Research Patterns
Increasing Wait Time I and Wait Time II to 3 seconds or more leads to pronounced improvements in student use of language and logic as well as to improvements in student and teacher attitudes and expectations.
The most dramatic finding is displayed here. You will note that the optimal length for Wait Time II is the same as for Wait Time I: three to five seconds.
Other benefits (from Mary Budd Rowe research) wil be addressed in PeopleGraph Activity:
response length increased,
Appropriate responses increased
Fewer students failed to respond
Students appeared to have more confidence
Student-student exchanges increased (teacher show and tell behavior decreased)
Students exhibit more speculative thinking (making inferences)
Student ask more questions
Students propose more investigations
Lower-achieving student contributed more
Student achievement improved on cognitively more complex test items
Classroom discipline improved.

13. Q uality uestioning Materials adapted from QUILT curriculum:
Henrico County
Public Schools
Closure: Turn to an elbow partner and share one point of interest from this presentation.
The PeopleGraph Activity will provide you with opportunities to consider the multiple benefits associated with the use of wait times.
Materials adapted from QUILT curriculum:
Questioning and Understanding to Improve Learning and Thinking