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!
What About the Turtles?
A Blog on Teaching, Language, the Language of Teachers, and Life in England
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Imagine you're having a conversation with someone. How can you tell that the other person is interested? What does the other person say or do (i.e., body language, verbal cues, phrases, etc.)?
I ask because part of my project involves designing activities that teach kids conversational behaviors, and I'm wondering if there are any examples I'm missing.
I ask because part of my project involves designing activities that teach kids conversational behaviors, and I'm wondering if there are any examples I'm missing.
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
In
addition to observing in schools and pontificating about teaching,
I've also been traveling around the UK by train and bus with Frances.
To take a line from The Castle, one
of my favorite movies, "We've seen some amazing things" Highlights of our time here have been:
The Yorkshire "Green and Pleasant" Dales:
Edin-"Really Old and Would-be National Capital"-burgh:
The Lake "Everest of England" District:
Rievaulx "Beautifully Seclued Medieval Ruins" Abbey:
But what I've enjoyed the most is how easy it is to walk (kind of like hiking, but not a direct translation because there's less wilderness here). Unlike the US, where we tend to put hiking trails in designated parkland (state parks, national parks, national forests, etc.), England has a massive network of footpaths that cross the country, stretching from village to village, leading over hill and dale, and generally making it hard not to put on a pair of boots and go.
Footpaths, I will miss you!
Edin-"Really Old and Would-be National Capital"-burgh:
The Lake "Everest of England" District:
Rievaulx "Beautifully Seclued Medieval Ruins" Abbey:
But what I've enjoyed the most is how easy it is to walk (kind of like hiking, but not a direct translation because there's less wilderness here). Unlike the US, where we tend to put hiking trails in designated parkland (state parks, national parks, national forests, etc.), England has a massive network of footpaths that cross the country, stretching from village to village, leading over hill and dale, and generally making it hard not to put on a pair of boots and go.
A
few weeks ago, Frances and I took a bus from Leeds straight to a tiny
village in the Yorkshire Dales called Burnsall, made up of a
pub/hotel, a shop, a church, a school, and a few houses that looked
capable of standing for another few hundred years. We didn't need to
drive miles out of town to a trailhead with a parking lot; we could
start right from civilization and get there without a car.
From the
center of the village, we started to walk! I can't think of many
places in the US where you'd be able to do that. Guided by our
trusty Ordnance Survey map (a series of maps that cover all of the UK
and show every village, road, footpath, stream, farmhouse, and stone
wall—essential, since most footpaths don't have destination signs,
and also my new favorite toy), we started following a fairly flat
path through fields of sheep grazing along the River Wharfe. We then
headed uphill to the top of Simon's Seat, where we found a light
coating of ice and snow and views for miles around. We went down the
other side, past a hidden waterfall, past more fields of sheep, past
more beautiful views, past the medieval Bolton Abbey, and into a village where we found a tea room that had excellent
scones (although I did have to pick out the raisins). After tea and
scones, we took a bus to a larger town and then a train back to
Leeds.
Let me recap: An eight-mile walk from one village, along a river, over a
mountain, and into another village, all without needing a car to get there and all
for very little money (just the bus and train tickets and the tea and
scones). What's more, if we had decided along the way that we wanted
to change course and head for a different hill or village, we could
have done so because the density of footpaths in much of England is
such that there is a seemingly infinite number of permutations a walking route can take.
In
the course of our time here, we've walked in the Peak District from a
village with a castle, past more fields of sheep, over a hill, and
into another village. We've walked along the coast from a fishing
village to a larger fishing town. And we've walked up Scafell, the
tallest mountain in England.
Footpaths, I will miss you!
Monday, December 14, 2015
In
the UK, school shootings are so rare (there was one in 1996) that in
one class I visited, kids played a math review game that involved
pretending to shoot each other when they got the right answer. (This
wouldn't really be OK in the US.) But the amount of security British
schools have in place, compared to American schools, would make you
think the US had never seen a school shooting.
This
is the general protocol for entering and traveling around a British
school:
1.
Find the one entrance to the school and buzz the video intercom.
2.
Walk to the reception desk to explain why you've come and which staff
member is expecting you. Keep in mind that the reception is in a
closed area—even if you want to get past, the locked doors would
stand in your way.
3.
Sign a visitor log on paper or on the computer (the computer will
also take your picture to keep a record of who's entered the school).
4.
Wait in the reception area for a staff member to greet you.
5.
Staff member uses magnetic fob to open doors past reception and show
you to the classroom.
6.
If you observe in multiple classrooms, a staff member may not escort
you to each one, but you will find that movement through the school
is impeded by the locked doors separating each corridor. The best
thing to do is wait for someone to come along with a fob to help get
you through.
7.
When you are ready to leave, you have to pass the reception desk
where you came in and sign out either on paper or on the computer.
In
summary, British schools make it much harder to enter and move
through the building. That seems like a better strategy than arming teachers.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Teacher:
What does la lune
mean?
Student:
The moon.
Teacher:
The moon, good.
Teacher:
How did people escape from the Fire of London?
Student:
They left on boats.
Teacher:
Yes, they left on boats.
Teacher:
What's the holiday we learned people celebrate in America?
Student: Thanksgiving.
Student: Thanksgiving.
Teacher:
Thanksgiving.
What
is happening in these interactions? Do adults speak to each other
this way? Why do teachers (and I know I've done this too) repeat the
exact same words a kid says? How often does this happen? Is it a
problem?
In
each of these dialogues (if you can call it that), a teacher is
saying the exact same words a child has just said. To be as general
as possible, in most classrooms teachers parrot students' responses
most of the time. I can't think of any authentic speech situation
that that resembles, which makes me think it's problematic. I'm not
completely sure why, but I have a few hypotheses:
1.
Teachers have louder voices than students and want to make sure
everyone has heard what a classmate has said.
2.
Teachers want to reinforce the correct answer by doubling the amount
of times it's been spoken.
3.
Teachers use this as a quick way of positively evaluating student
learning.
If
#1 is true, then it comes from a legitimate concern. We want to make
sure all students hear what their classmates have said because an
individual student's response contributes to the shared knowledge
base that the whole class can use to access new learning. But by
repeating student answers, we give them the insidious message that
they don't really need to listen to their peers because they'll hear
the same thing again from the teacher. The next time we think the
rest of the class might not have heard what someone has said, let's
think about some alternatives to parroting: 1. If the student's voice
was so quiet that some students may have missed what was said, then
encourage that student to say it again at a louder volume (and if
this is an issue for enough students, then do some explicit
instruction on how to speak in class). 2. If other students were
looking away from the student answering, or talking at the same time, then
remind them of the expectation that they have to listen to and look
at the speaker and have the student try answering again.
If
#2 is true, then why not have the whole class repeat the answer
together? And maybe this can be a reminder that if we ask too many
questions that prompt answers short enough to be quickly repeated, we
need to vary our question types so that students can engage with
learning at a deeper level.
If
#3 is true, then let's think of alternatives. Maybe we can get
students to be metacognitive by asking them how they knew, or how
they figured out, the answer. Did they use a classroom resource?
Did they just remember what they learned yesterday? Did they know
the answer from having read a book or having seen a website? Or
maybe we don't need to say anything at all? After a correct answer
to a closed question, maybe we can build pace by moving to the next
question or maybe we can take a few seconds to think of a more
interesting, open-ended question to ask next.
Let's
just stop parroting our kids. Let's just stop...oh, wait.
A
while ago, I wrote about “academic indulgence,” a teaching stance
that recognizes students' intellect and accommodates their interests
and ideas. At Morton Green Primary School in Bradford, I've seen
many teachers adopt this stance toward their students. But first, a
little context about Bradford...
Bradford
is about ten miles west of Leeds and has long been overshadowed by
it. It has some of the highest levels of deprivation (British
terminology for low income) in the country, in part because of
de-industrialization (same story in so many cities) and because of
its distance from major road and rail routes to London and
Manchester. Aesthetically, downtown Bradford looks much more like an
American rust belt city than a British city. Commerce is clearly
lagging, with a disproportionate amount of betting parlors, pound
shops, and pawn shops. The amount of multi-lane roads through the
center make it less pedestrian-friendly than what I've seen elsewhere
in England. And bus travel within the city is difficult because of
limited schedules and irregular service. That being said, Bradford
has been a home to significant numbers of economic migrants from
Pakistan who came for factory work in the 1950s and 1960s, many of
whose children and grandchildren still live there.
Back
to Morton Green. I've seen teachers listen to a student's response
to a question and then ask another student to extend the first
student's thought. I've seen activities in which students have to
take a position on an open-ended question and then convince their
peers to take the same point of view by using language in meaningful
and powerful ways. I've seen teachers respond to students with
genuine interest in what they're saying (more on this in the next
post) and push them to extend their thinking. I've seen students
learning from experience that the product of collaboration should be
consensus and not dispute.
In
short, lots of great things happening at Morton Park.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
As a
caveat to everything that follows this sentence, I'll point out that
I only spent two days observing just two schools in one city in
Finland. So while I won't attempt to turn what little I've observed
and read about the Finnish education system into a fine-grained,
comparative analysis on what makes Finnish schools excel, I will
list, in order of personally identified importance, what I think
might be some key factors in their success:
6.
Finnish orthography is extremely transparent, which means that even
more than in Spanish, reading Finnish involves knowing individual
letter sounds and putting those sounds together as they are written
in a word. Since Finnish kids need less time learning to decode than
Anglophone kids, who have to figure out how to claw through digraphs
(ch/sh/th/ph/kn), vowel teams (the three sounds for ou),
and silent letters, they can progress more quickly to higher order
learning. Does anyone else find this a
compelling enough reason
to adopt Finnish as our
national language? English
already has plenty of Finnish loan words like sauna
and...and…
Check
out this article from The Atlantic:
And
this academic article too:
5.
Students and teachers don't wear shoes in the classroom. Instead,
they leave their shoes outside and put on socks, slippers, or Crocs
(yes, Crocs!). And while I don't think Crocs are the answer to
America's educational woes, I do think it sends a message that
school, though necessarily rigorous and serious, is a place where
kids should be comfortable, happy, and at home.
4.
Few Finns cross the street against a “Don't Walk” sign. Finland
is of course not the only country where jaywalking is a less than
common practice, but I found the explanation for it striking. I'll
go ahead and generalize: whereas people in other non-jaywalking
countries (and I've heard this from a Swiss person, so it must be
true) wait to cross the street because conformity to the rules has
value in its own right, Finnish people explain that they will cross
against the light only when there are no children present because
although adults can judge when the intersection is safe enough to
cross, they wouldn't want to model this practice in front of those
with a less developed capacity to assess risk. Just one anecdote, but
there has to be something there about how a country's bigger people
collectively perceive their responsibility toward its smaller people.
3.
Finland has more legitimate, socially valued, and economically viable
post-secondary options than the US. In addition to traditional
universities for students with academic goals, there is also a system
of polytechnic schools that offer a route to a trade like carpentry,
plumbing, electrical work, and forestry—lines of work that are as
important as in any country but that have more value in Finland.
Instead of facing the choice between college, the military, and
failure—a choice often presented in terms that stark to American
high-schoolers—Finnish students can see many paths to success.
This trickles down to the primary level, where students have
opportunities to excel in more non-academic ways than in American
schools. In addition to reading, writing, math, science, history,
and foreign language (two, since Swedish and English are both
compulsory), all kids take craft
(woodworking/metalwork/engineering/design), textiles
(sewing/knitting), and art. This means that a student who is
relatively less successful in traditional academic areas still has
opportunities to achieve at school. And because the Finnish
education system (and Finnish society more broadly) is structured in
a way that offers non-academic post-secondary options, a
high-achiever in craft education knows that future options exist
within the traditional education system, other than dropping out of
school.
2.
Teachers generally teach the same class of students from first grade
through sixth grade. At the warm and fuzzy level, I can think of
nothing more professionally satisfying than getting to spend six
years with the class I taught last year. At the quantitative level,
research shows that keeping teachers with the same class over several
years benefits students in a variety of ways
(http://www.ericdigests.org/1998-2/looping.htm), especially when…see
below...
1.
Teachers are smart. It almost doesn't seem worth taking up valuable
internet real estate with this obvious proposition, but I'll go ahead
anyway...kids learn more from smarter teachers. There are of course
many ways to be smart, but Finnish teachers are more capable in math and literacy—the key subject areas that schools
around the world teach—compared to their international peers.
According to the article below, written by one of the big names in
studying the quantitative value of teachers, if American teachers
were as smart as Finnish teachers, American students would move half
a standard deviation on PISA, an internationally administered test
that measures the cognitive ability of high school students.
This
article in Smithsonian paints a bigger picture of Finnish
education than what I've offered here:
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