This term – or something like it (countdown?) – was recently used here, but I can’t find the comments. Is that the same as wait time? I’m trying to get clarification on this term, which I haven’t heard before.
Laurie was in on that discussion, I do remember that. She was talking about the period from asking a question to waiting for a response, I think. So is that what this term means? I call it wait time, and oh man is it important and it is also something we rarely do often enough.
We must allow the students time to process the sound into meaning. We need to wait before going on to the next question. Few of us do this all the time. This is a huge point. We must wait for a strong one word choral answer all the time before going on. That was my big learning of the summer from Von.
So this post is just to remind myself to wait those three or four seconds after asking the question, counting to myself or not. If we are just starting to learn what the all-important questioning/circling process is all about, we should probably count it out, but if we have been at it for a long time we should have it as part of the natural pacing in our questioning technique. We just have to make sure that we do it.
This topic falls under the category of checking for meaning, and in this space we must absolutely return to it. We must always remember the idea of constantly checking to make sure that our students have understood us. What we do is we wait after asking the question, (consciously counting seconds or just feeling the wait time), and we wait for a strong choral one word response from group, and only then do we go on with the questioning.
The other big categories for success, in my view, are SLOW and Staying in Bounds. We should be talking about those three things all the time here, reminding each other to always do all three of them.