Most teachers are familiar with the term "wait time."  It refers to the amount of time that passes between the end of a teacher's question and the first student response, and in most classes it lasts less than one second.  Mary Rowe, a professor at the University of Florida and then Stanford, came up with a name for this almost imperceptible amount of time and studied the relationships between wait time and students' classroom experiences.  What she found was both expected, for anyone who's made a conscious effort to increase classroom wait time, and amazing.

One thing she found was that in classrooms where wait time was less than one second, student responses mostly consisted of short phrases and little elaboration.  However, when teachers increased wait time to three seconds (just 3!), students spoke between 300% and 700% more words when they responded to questions and participated in classroom dialogue.  I think that when teachers hear about needing to increase wait time in our own classrooms, we sometimes to think of it as just one more task to check off.  But when we think about wait time in terms of this research, it's clear that adding just two seconds of silence after asking a question has measurably profound effects on the classroom's oral environment.

The other finding I thought was really powerful was that an increase in average wait time correlates with a decrease in disciplinary moves.  Rowe's idea here was that when teachers ask rapid-fire questions, kids can't focus on what they're supposed to be learning, which means they get restless and inattentive and have trouble meeting behavioral expectations.  When wait time increases, kids focus more, feel more motivated to participate, and thus misbehave less.  Many teachers worry that increasing wait time will leave directionless gaps during which students will take advantage of a lapse in teacher control and start acting up.  Research on wait time, though, shows that just the opposite will happen.

The article where this research comes from is called "Wait Time: Slowing Down May Be a Way of Speeding Up," which calls attention to how a slight increase in the amount of silence in the classroom (slowing down the conversation) can actually raise the level of classroom discourse (speeding things up).  How cool is that!