Social Communication: Giving Wait Time

The truth is that most teachers and this is not special ed specific, this is general ed and special ed right, most teachers don't give enough wait time to their students. That includes students with disabilities and neurotypical students. We we're just trying to move a little faster right, so we don't actually include enough wait time. Here's a couple different strategies that I would try. First off is that you may try to ask the question before you get to the point in the lesson where you would normally ask the question. I know that sounds weird but all we're doing is we're front loading the question and giving a little more time in order for the student to formulate their response and get that back to us. Right? So here's an example, you might say in a few minutes I'm going to ask how you convert Fahrenheit to Celsius. Johnny I'm going to want you to answer that question and then maybe at that point you do a little bit of review and then you come back in a very casual way right. Johnny how do you convert Fahrenheit to Celsius? So now here's where I'm asking the question. The student has already had some built in time to formulate that response as part of their wait time and a time to process the information without having to put it put the rest of the class on hold. A second strategy here would be to ask the same question to more than one person where you do kind of elicit this parrot request this parrot effect. Right? So you're gonna ask the question how do you convert Fahrenheit to Celsius to one student then you're gonna ask the question again to another student. Now that student has already had the benefit of hearing it one time so they're really just repeating it, but it's reinforcing as an as a response or answer to all of the students. Then you might come to Johnny and ask the exact same question. Now he's had time to process the information because he's had a couple of people answer it before him, but he's also had the benefit of hearing it answered a couple of times and being able to internalize that response. So we are still targeting Johnny but we're building in some wait time and building in some support to him that of course will depend on Johnny's skills and and areas of need. So that might not work for you in this specific instance, but having that set up is actually a pretty beneficial for a lot of different people not just for Johnny. The third is that you can pre deliver the questions to Johnny ahead of time. That could be in writing that could be on a post it before you ask it out loud. Lots of students feel anxiety when it comes to being called on by the teacher so if you know there's some questions that you're going to ask the class you might just throw them up on the board at the beginning of the class so that all of the students can have a heads up of the type of questions that are going to be asked during the lesson. At least they know what's coming. If you're just concerned specifically with with Johnny only and you don't feel like the rest of your students need this kind of warning or heads up, write the question on a post it and give it to Johnny a little bit before the question is going to be asked so that he knows it's coming. And then fourth here try a pair share moment. Give your entire class a minute to collaborate with their elbow partner or their face partner to come up with the answer to this question while you go to Johnny and give him that full minute to come up with his response. So he's getting a little bit extra wait time and time to formulate that answer to deliver to you and you're able to assess his response and performance while other students are pairing up socially so that they can communicate and commit to an answer to come back to the class with. So think about how you can kind of pair in this collaboration piece. I guess the long and short of it is that we're gonna have to mix it up right. Johnny still needs the wait time and we want to make sure that they get the wait time that they need, so we're just gonna change up how we're asking the question, how much in advance we're asking the question, and how we're engaging the other students in the same process so that everyone is betting benefiting from this question answer process.