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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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:

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-the-english-language-is-holding-kids-back/385291/

And this academic article too:

http://www.elemedu.upatras.gr/english/images/porpodas/Seymour_Aro_Erskine_Porpodas_et_al_2003_BJP.pdf

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. 

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG14_06_Hanushek_Piopiunik_Wiederhold.pdf

This article in Smithsonian paints a bigger picture of Finnish education than what I've offered here:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-49859555/