Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

widely quoted average ‘wait time’ 8 – the pause between asking a question and then diving in with the answer (or another question, which means they’ve got two to answer now) is between 0.7 and 1.4 seconds. As someone once pointed out to me, the only person who can answer a question that quickly is the one who posed it! I used to encourage teachers to put their hands behind their back once they had asked a question and count on their fingers to ten as a way of stopping themselves from jumping in, but maybe I was being overgenerous. Researcher Mary Budd Rowe who pioneered the concept of ‘wait time’ found that by waiting for just three seconds there was a dramatic increase in the quality of the student responses including an increase in the length of the response, an increase in the likelihood of the response being correct, an overall decrease in the number of ‘I don’t know’ or non responses, an increase in the number of people attempting to answer the question from across the class and, in US research, an increase in SAT scores.
    Neurologically speaking, some people are ‘fast processors’ and some are ‘slow processors’ based on the way that electricity cycles through their brains. The fast processors can process quite a few chunks of information in a short period of time and quickly come up with an answer. The slow processors can process fewer chunks in a set period of time and therefore it takes them longer to respond. On the whole, they are just as clever. They are just not as quick. But, in a classroom situation, we tend to equate quick with clever, the two even being synonymous in many a school report. The message we unintentionally send to children when we work like this is, ‘He’s quicker than me, therefore he’s cleverer than me, therefore I’m not very clever, therefore I’m stupid’ and then we hit the slippery slope of self-esteem road before veering across the off-ramp of self-fulfilling prophecies. What’s more, if you are a quick thinker, the danger is that you only end up ever thinking quickly. One of the cleverest people I know, a former aid to Stephen Hawking, is one of the slowest thinkers I have ever met, no good in a pub quiz but great at brewing the beer.
    It has also been remarked that you can split fast and slow responders along sex lines, especially when they are younger. So often in primary schools it will be boys who have their hands up first, before they’ve had sufficient time to even think about the answer, often before you’ve had time to ask the question. They don’t so much care about accuracy asbeing first. Girls, on the other hand, are happy to share an answer with everybody once they have had the time to work out if it is the right answer. They don’t want to be first, they want to look good.
    Another benefit of the waiting for an answer approach is that it sends a message to the students – it is your job to answer this question not mine! Too often when confronted with any situation which involves asking a student to think, they know that if they look pathetic enough, stick their hand up and say in a whiney voice, ‘What have we got to do, Miss?’ that you will sort them out and do the thinking for them. Eventually this becomes the set response to everything, especially if, when they do have a go, they feel they always fail. A well-known phenomenon in the classroom is the way in which children – girls in particular according to some research – can develop what is called ‘learned helplessness’, 9 where their response to a new challenge is predicted by their failures in previous challenges and they simply don’t try in order to obviate yet more feelings of inadequacy. In a fascinating online article entitled ‘Learned Helplessness and School Failure’ 10 by Robert Gordon and Myrna Gordon, they refer to it as ‘a conditioned response to failure that creates cognitive, motivational, and emotional deficits in our children’ and, unchecked, it can lead not only to school failure and disaffection but also mental illness such as depression. 11 This is particularly the case, according to research by Paul Gilbert from the Mental Health Research Unit 12 in Derby (Gilbert 1984), (following the original research by Martin Seligman 13 that involved some quite unpleasant experiments on dogs and rats), when the following criteria are met –‘the individual is aware of uncontrollable factors in their environment, the individual views the situation