Watch and Wait, Letting Students Discover Connections

Have you ever had the opportunity to watch somebody learn new information? If you haven't, it truly is a sight to behold. It's always fun getting to see that light bulb turn on, the connection is made, and now everything makes sense to the student. It's beautiful!

But those beautiful moments only occur because we as educators take a step back.

The butterfly

There's a story that quite a few of us are probably familiar with. And that is the story of how you don’t want to help a butterfly out of its cocoon.  

The idea is that if you help the butterfly get out of its cocoon before it has the ability to build its own strength, you end up weakening the butterfly rather than helping the butterfly. I have always loved this analogy in the world of education because it perfectly describes what we as educators do. Education is a lot like preparing a cocoon for our students.

Over time, we feed our students, help them grow strong so that they too can be transformed by what we have taught them.  Kind of like how we were transformed by the information that we learned, huh.

There are also other stories and a lot of commentary on the idea of hardship and building strength. The concept of grit is not something that is often taught, but that is something you develop through failure as well.  You can build your educational grit when you  fail to understand the information you are learning. This comes when we discuss information, fail at understanding, and then relearn the experience again and again until we finally find success.  Remember, to succeed you first have to fail.

The reason why this is titled watching and waiting is because you're going to be doing a lot of that. While you're helping your students learn material, you need to give them time to learn the content. At the same time, you're trying to teach your students. 

This can be a really frustrating moment!

But don't lose hope just yet! Your students will be fine!  Watching and waiting takes time and you aren’t really looking for everyone to catch up to the same level at the same time, because that isn't going to happen.   

So what's waiting?

I'm not going to treat you like an idiot and assume you don't know what the word wait means. 

In the case of education, waiting can refer to a few different things.  It could be the wait time between levels of information, or the time needed for a student to process their thoughts.  Waiting is a very powerful tool when you are working with others!

Take some time to get to know your students and the questions that they generally ask. As you listen to what they say, pay attention to what they don't understand.  This will help you provide those pieces of information that help your students put the pieces together.  This process is always quite a bit of fun because you also get to see where you need to grow too! 

Another reason that waiting is so important, is that you have to give your students time to think. If they  don't have the time to process information, then they aren’t going to synthesize what you are asking them to learn. 

There's been plenty of research that shows how difficult it is for people to recall information quickly. Does this mean that it's not possible for many people? That's not the case.

The human mind can connect many different things very quickly. When we ask the brain to connect something new, we are challenging it to find a new process.

This is one of the big reasons that wait time exists. Students need that time to connect the information that you have taught them up to this point. If they aren’t connecting that information, that’s when you need to really evaluate how you present your content. 

We've talked about the beauty of connections and the reasons why you want them, but how do you get students there? It's not easy. 

You could have to teach someone your material while also helping them relearn mathematics.  It can get pretty overwhelming if you don't prepare ahead of time … which is what I'm here to tell you:

Prepare ahead of time. 

As educators, we never know what questions we are going to be asked. So we have to prepare ahead of time.  Have resources available, videos ready to go, walkthroughs and reading materials already set up and any sort of additional materials ready before your student even needs to ask for it.

You have a responsibility to the people that you have decided to take under your wing. You are now responsible for their education on top of their ability to create connections. If you provide them with the best resources you can find, then your students are going to be better prepared to take on the world and apply what you have taught them.