1. A professor gives a dense, fast-paced lecture with lots of slides. Students scribble down notes, trying to keep up. They need to get all the key information down before class ends.
2. In a flipped classroom, students go from one clicker question to the next. They talk about each question with a partner, and once all the answers are in and the instructor has expanded on them, go on to the next problem. No question takes more than a few minutes to get through.
These scenarios are taken from styles of teaching that are typically held up as polar opposites, yet I would argue that they are more similar than different. In particular, they fail the same way. In neither classroom is deep thought occurring. And it is not occurring for the same reason -- lack of time.
Ben Orlin has a typically charming post on barriers to deep thinking in school. However, I think he missed one. Students do not think deeply in school because there is no time for them to do so.
The primary requirement for thoughtful learning is time because the primary requirement for thought is time -- whether for private contemplation or for a conversation to proceed beyond the obvious. I have been to too many teaching workshops where participants were given a question to discuss in groups and just as the discussion was getting good, just as learning was starting to occur, we were interrupted and had to go on to the next question. Using fewer questions might have worked better.
The humanist and educator Diana Senechal wrote about similar experiences during her teacher training in her book Republic of Noise:
Just as I started to ponder a topic, I had to move into my group and start working and talking. The work seemed superficial and rushed. It seemed, moreover, that the groups reached predictable conclusions about what they read or did. The instructor would move from group to group, listening to each discussion for a few minutes. When, at the end of class, she pulled together the insights of the day, it seemed that many of the finer points had vanished.
In order for our students to have a chance to think, we must slow down. If lecturing, remove some material that students can read on their own and give them time to process. In a math class I teach, I've experimented with pausing after a long derivation and giving the students a minute or two to think through what just happened in whatever way they need, whether doodling on paper, discussing or staring off into space. I plan to try explicitly providing time for students to come up with questions to ask after covering a topic.
Another potential strategy to give students more time to think, mentioned on Susan Cain's Quiet Revolution blog, is to ask them a question at the end of a lesson that will be discussed next time. Ideally, the question should be one that deserves the time and solitude this approach provides. This is quite similar to inquiry-based learning in math and may be one of the reasons I like that approach.
Let's take the time to think of ways to give our students time to think.
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