1) Insufficient "Wait-Time"
"Wait-time" is the amount of time after an initial question has been posed before the teacher answers it, repeats, rephrases, or adds further information to the question; or accepts an answer from a student.
More than just a few seconds are necessary for mental information-processing (Moriber, 1971; Rowe, 1974). When the teacher becomes a nonstop talker, filling every possible silence with his voice, what chance do students have to think over what is being said, formulate intelligent responses, or ask for clarification.
Mental information-processing may be accompanied by verbal analyses or proceed in silence. It does seem logical, therefore, that if the facilitation of students' learning is of paramount importance, then teachers should allow for individual differences in learning style by providing a modicum of quiet time for thinking as well as opportunities for verbal responses.
Students who note that their instructor answers a preponderance of his own questions without waiting for a response soon grow dependent upon the teacher to do their thinking for them. In like manner, an answer too rapidly accepted has the effect of cutting off further information-processing and analysis by the rest of the class. Instructors may attest verbally to their aim of encouraging independent thinking, but unless they consciously work to expand their wait-time, they will have rhetoric with little resultant change in behavior.
Rowe (1974) reported that when teachers were trained to increase their wait-time from one second to 3-5 seconds, several changes occurred in students' behavior: the length and number of unsolicited but appropriate responses increased, the number of failures to respond decreased, and the incidence of student-to-student comparisons of data increased. Instructors who are interested in repeating this experiment in their own classrooms can measure their wait-times ("one, one-thousand; two, one-thousand," etc., sufficing for timing purposes) and then deliberately expand these periods of silence-for-thinking both after a question is posed and after an answer has been given. Sharing the concept of wait-time for thinking with the students often enables the teacher to maximize his efforts and gives the class an insight into learning skills.