Mary Budd Rowe (1986) researched the ‘wait time’ that teachers allowed after asking a question. ‘Wait time’ is the length of quiet time that teachers allow after asking a question before they expect a student to answer, or before they rephrase the question or even answer the question themselves. Her team analysed 300 tape recordings of teachers asking questions over six years. They found the mean wait time was 0.9 seconds.
If you ask a question that requires the students to think, are you really giving them enough time to think, or are you only giving them time to instantly react?
The teachers in Budd Rowe’s research were trained so that they became able to increase their wait time to between three and five seconds. The increased wait time resulted in:
In other words, the students had more time to think and that increased the level (and quality) of discussion that went on in the classroom, which in turn meant the teachers learnt more about their students thinking and were able to act on any misconceptions. Increasing wait time is not easy to do and can feel odd when you start, but if your students are to think, they must be given sufficient time.
Activity 4 asks you to experiment with increasing the wait time in your classroom in a similar way.
Like the teachers in Budd Rowe’s research, in your next lesson, increase your wait time for students to respond to five seconds. After the lesson, reflect on whether you observed:
The next activity links together many of the ideas that have been discussed so far. It suggests that you:
Preparation
This activity is an example of the kinds of rich activity that students need to build their understanding of fractions. For this task you will need a quantity of paper plates, or card cut into rectangles of the same size.
Arrange the students to work in groups of three or four, and give them a pile of paper plates or cards. You may want to look at the key resource ‘Using groupwork’ to help you prepare for this.
The activity
Make sure everyone is able to do this before carrying on.
The idea is to give everyone time to play a little with fractions and to think about what fractions are.
Now move on to problems that mix the two ideas.
I gave each group 12 paper plates. The plates were to help to support the students’ thinking that finding fractions is about sharing out equally.
First, I set them the task of dividing the plates into quarters. I asked several of the groups to talk about the process of dividing into quarters. Then I asked them to divide their 12 plates into thirds. When they had done this, I once again asked the students to explain how they did it. I made sure that everyone was comfortable sharing out the objects that they were working with, in this case the plates. The students enjoyed working and collaborating together in groups and completing the task.
I then decided that the class was ready for a more challenging question. I gave each group one more plate, so that they then had 13 plates, and again asked them to divide the plates into quarters and then thirds. This time the students discovered that they needed to subdivide the extra plate in order to share out the plates equally into quarters and thirds.
This time I spent more time on the feedback session in order to make sure that everyone understood the reason why one of the plates had to be subdivided. I then asked the class to divide the plates into thirds, and this time I offered them scissors as well. Several students gave some good reasons why they needed to divide up the extra plate, but working in groups helped them all to try out their ideas first before telling the whole class.
![]() Pause for thought
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