More videos from Bradley Busch
Video transcript
right well let’s dive straight in what’s the first tip you’ve got for us today okay so my first tip uh which is now i’m getting really interested at the moment about uh is around um being open to increasing wait times uh after you ask a question uh i look back on my early practice i think that’s probably why i find it a bit interesting is i hated awkward silences uh whenever i was observed always thought good practice looked really dynamic back and forth um and partly i think like a lot of i guess education got involved to try and help students so therefore rush to help them when they were struggling when there was a long silence and yet the research that i’ve been reading around wait times i think is really fascinating and i think the reason this is kind of my first tip is to consider increasing the wait times is i feel like as a community we’re getting really good at understanding the benefits of retrieval practice and you have to convince people about what retrieval practice is or why it helps we’re now going to get into the nuance of how do we maximize it and i think wait times is going to be very closely linked to that because we don’t want to short circuit that retrieval practice process wow this is fascinating i i love this i’m exactly the same as you and i was terrible in my early teaching career at that weight i’m just diving in straight away i was scared of silence as well what have you been reading on this bradley what’s the research on this i’ve certainly not come across this myself so there’s actually quite a bit of research but quite weirdly and i don’t know if this is going to change it seems to be fairly old research which i don’t necessarily think this is a problem but there haven’t been an abundance of recent studies um so one basically i spent about three days just trying to find a paper that could give me the answer what is the perfect wait time so then i could just go and say it’s 7.3 seconds and we’ll all be happy uh yeah no research paper exists i think it depends on too many factors what they did find was the average wait time that teachers tend to wait after they ask a question uh and it seems to be between about 0.7 and 1.4 seconds what is the benchmark um they said a number of teachers and we’ve had teachers tell us this um wait like 0.2 or 0.3 seconds when you actually time it and the reason i love that because i kind of come from a sport background is uh you said bolt’s reaction time 100 meters is 0.2 seconds so it kind of gets gives indication of if we really want students to retrieve hard you know is 0.2 seconds going to be their best answer or just the first answer um and then i found one study didn’t i should kind of make clear it wasn’t saying this is the optimal but they looked at a threshold of three seconds and what they found is after three seconds both the quality and quantity of answers increased um and i think sometimes looking back at my korean what we’ve heard other teachers say is we don’t want to increase wait times too much because you don’t the quickest to get bored is sometimes what you hear but i don’t think three seconds i think it’s enough of a window as an example that extends the opportunity for everyone without demotivating the quickest as well so it’s not saying three seconds is the ideal but it gives an indication of it’s worth considering how long we leave i think is what i kind of took from that study it’s really interesting you say this i i think i remember dylan william and when i want to hear him give a talk he was he was citing similar research and the other interesting thing he said was that teachers always overestimate how much time they are they are giving so if you ask teachers they’ll say oh yeah i’ll wait five seconds six seconds when you actually measure it and it’s 0.2 or whatever it’s it’s it’s quite a shock isn’t it as teachers we can be quite easily fooled just generally can’t we uh and i’ll tell you what i felt um i thought that can’t double when everyone had to do online teaching yeah when you can’t even pick up like any verbal nonverbal cues and you ask a question you don’t know are they sitting there thinking i’m really thinking really hard about this and i’m right on the edge of getting it or are they really bored so we tend to i think everyone has this sort of negativity bias we tend to assume the worst and so therefore i should move on quickly um so yeah i think generally speaking people are quite poor at that self-estimation of how long we actually leave that’s really interesting i’ll tell you the other thing to talk about online teaching so i i’ve been doing a lot of online kind of courses over the last couple of years running them and there’s a lot of things that are very very bad about running online courses versus being there in person but one of the things i found worse is knowing how long to give teachers to either work on a task or think about an answer or discourse and so on whereas when you’re in person obviously you can get a bit of a sense from the room you know when people are ready whereas online i i the only way i found to do is i put a little question up saying click click click yes when you’re ready to move on and the problem i have with that is let’s say i’ve got 50 people um online as soon as i see about two or three who’ve clicked yes i start getting anxious thinking oh god i best start moving on here and it’s related the reason i say that it reminds me of what you just said there where we as a teacher i always have kind of the kind of fastest kid in mind if that makes sense and i think well as soon as somebody’s ready i better start getting the ball rolling whereas the other 90 percent of kids or whatever they may need those extra few seconds just like the other 90 of teachers during you know online workshops they will probably appreciate it but there’s all we’re always kind of in a rush aren’t we to to kind of satisfy the the one or two who are ready to move on if that makes sense ah absolutely and um the other thing that i would kind of why i can’t see that similar is um if we rush and someone gets the answer right we don’t know if they’ve got it right because they just guessed because they felt under pressure to come up with an answer and they just guess anything or if they actually really know the content and that’s actually really problematic if we talk about checking for understanding and misconceptions if i assume that you know this because you’ve got the answer right whereas actually you just got lucky because you felt under pressure to blur something out that can hinder the learning process as well so yeah it’s interesting how it’s aimed for the quickest and yet it can lead to either sloppy mistakes or in fact blind guessing which is still problematic i think yeah this is fascinating the other thing i love that you said there bradley as well is the fact that it’s you kind of the research into retrieval is so ubiquitous ubiquitous now and has made its way into classrooms and now it’s the time to start thinking about the nuances i’d never tied the two together before the notion of wait time and the power of retrieval and the fact that if we give students longer to think they’ve got they’re accessing long-term memory they’re making more connections than if we if we try and drive it forward at a quicker pace that’s fascinating that bradley so the way a colleague described it to me is essentially on a basic level everyone’s brain works a different speed and so therefore if we short circuit the wait time only the quickest have done successful retrieval practice which means because of like you know the massive effect that like you know the more you know that you did it to learn new information the gap just gets wider then because those who probably need it the most haven’t had that successful retrieval and so now for me the two are inextricably linked because i want everyone doing retrieval practice successfully ideally but sure wait times don’t facilitate that this is fascinating so i guess the big question here because it is interesting when i first started my voyage through the research i was getting so mad that there just wasn’t answers clear answers to all the questions so if we don’t have it with with uh with wait time we don’t have this optimal which makes sense right of course it’s going to depend on so many different factors i guess the big question bradley is is how as teachers do we know how much weight time to give is is there anything there that we can do any signs any indications any kind of benchmarks i mean i guess for me i i was at first frustrated that there was no keen answer and then i’ve actually now come to the kind of at peace with it in terms of maybe that’s the role of researchers at best it just kind of informs and it gives guidelines and it should never replace teacher judgment it’s always going to come down to an individual judgment call um i have heard some teachers when we speak them about it say um the type of question makes a difference um in terms of if it’s factual or if it’s kind of a high order one um just the practicalities of you know how much content do we need to get through because like that we can all sit here and say in an ideal world we should leave long wait times but if there is real world pressure to get through a heavy curriculum like you do have to factor that in i think how much stuff do the students already know makes a difference um probably why you’re asking the question and to know i don’t think i would love that i wish i could come up with a new formula um and i don’t think there is i think it’s just it’s worth the discussion around how long do i leave and what factors do i consider and those might be some of them and that’s kind of why i was quite keen on my the way i kind of worded the first tip to you was wasn’t increased wait times or to give a long wait time it’s it’s just important to consider and reflect how long you leave and why you leave them and i think that’s what research should be about is driving that self-reflection as opposed to here’s a neat answer necessarily that’s really good and final thing just on this tip i’m always a big fan of kind of research best bets because again we don’t have these definitive answers but there are certain kind of best bets from research that might come out is it i’ll try and push on this bradley it would you go so far as to say just in general obviously there’s going to be exceptions but as teachers that perhaps if we ask a question when our instinct is to then you know call upon the students to give our answer it might be a good idea just to hold fire for a couple more seconds then perhaps our instincts is certainly for less experienced teachers that might be that might be a smart move or is that is that too broad no i think that’s fine i think i think the potential gains outweigh the potential losses uh in that so like as a rule of thumb going a bit slower than you think is probably a really healthy starting point love it