The Three Second Rule All Teachers Need to Know
Although it is not new information, it is important to state: Questioning is elementary to great teaching, but quality questioning strategies are rare.
Following the success of Sputnik in October 1967, the United States of America moved to improve the teaching of science in its schools. As the head of the science education research division of the National Science Foundation, Mary Budd Rowe, from the University of Florida, lead the research on questioning. She found that teachers that not only tended to ask two or three questions per minute and expected a student to respond in .09 seconds, but also that the teacher often answered their own questions.
Mary Budd Rowe went on to experiment with questioning skills and found that a wait time of three seconds increased the calibre of the answers and therefore the understanding and the learning both collectively and individually among students. When done systematically in a sequence, the result was even better: Ask the question, wait three seconds, call on a student to answer it, wait three seconds, call on a second student to paraphrase the previous answer, and then to agree or disagree.
In following this type of questioning pattern, the impulsivity of the teacher to answer the questions is reduced. Just as importantly, students required to paraphrase answers of another student required them to actively listen to the answers instead of working
on what they are going to say when their turn arrives. This builds the lifelong skill of listening.
This style of questioning takes much more time than the normal questioning process, but for a teacher working to complete the syllabus, it takes less time overall to master
the content. Less haste, more speed!
Later research, following Mary Budd Rowe, highlighted the advantages of random questioning. After asking the question, one researcher used a hand held digital device to randomly select the next name. This ensured every student was included in the process and required to think about whatever was being said. They could not
assume that if they didn’t put up their hand they wouldn’t be asked to answer. Thus, there was a major incentive for each student to be on task and engaged. In my own case
I stopped hands being raised at all within my classes. This took a little getting used to,
and even some reluctance from students, especially the alpha students, who had to unlearn a well-established practice, and relearn the new one.
If a hand-held device is not available, a data area in your computer, or even an old-fashioned sheet of paper will do. A tick beside each name as they are called upon to answer, will enable the teacher to ensure that questions are asked of everybody. Using ice cream sticks or something similar, put the students’ names on them, and place them in a jar. That has now become a simple, ready-made tool for the teacher to randomly pick out a stick for the next person to provide an answer. I went to visit one of those primary schools in Auckland that parents want to get their children into. It’s a good school. The principal knows I am interested in questioning and wants me to see a teacher in action, so we visit her room. The answers being given to the questions the teacher asks are superb, but I’m suspicious as they seem to be coming from only one area of the room. I ask if I can ask a question, which I do, and then turn and ask a child, in a part of the room that had been silent. Not only could she not answer the question, but she didn’t know what the question was either! She had been lulled into a dreaming state. Wait time and random questioning would have had the group engaged and thinking. I estimated that at least two-thirds of the room were in the disengaged group.
Teachers are conservative and often want to keep to the tried and true practices. After taking a session in a school on the above, a teacher challenged me by saying that she
was not going to try this because teaching was all about promoting success. Therefore,
as her alpha pupils were the first with their hands up, they need to be rewarded for that success. Her argument was more complex than that, but she had completely missed the point. What she was really arguing was that she did not want to change because she was a good teacher, and she was getting good results. Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, had the answer to this when he stated that, “Good is the enemy of great.” Teachers need to be willing to try new ideas in order to become great – simply changing small things we are already good at can make us great!