 Early in my teaching career, I had the good fortune to watch a video of myself teaching. I say good fortune because even though I was actually horrified by what I saw, that feeling pushed me to do something about it. What I noticed was that I spent a lot of time talking, and the children, well, let's just say that I did occasionally pause long enough for them to get in a word or two, and then of course, being the good teacher that I am, I would re-voice what the student said. Just to make sure everyone heard it, but what I hadn't realized was that the teacher talk moves I was making were hindering the kind of classroom discourse I actually wanted. I was very much stuck in the IRE or initiate, respond, evaluate pattern of classroom discourse. It kind of goes like this, teacher asks a question, student responds, teacher evaluates the response and moves on. I've come to think of it as the guess what's in the teacher's head style of questioning and it leaves very little room for higher order thinking skills. In fact, I would often see students searching my face for a clue about an answer or what they think I wanted to hear. I think we teachers have unwittingly trained children to do this, so it's not surprising that I started off my career with this pattern. It wasn't all bad though. I realized the questions I was asking had the potential to elicit student thinking. I just wasn't very good at the listening part. I expected my students to listen to me, but I wasn't really listening to them and I seldom asked them to listen to each other. Wanting to change this, I focused on two teacher moves in particular, wait time and re-voicing. Some of you may already be familiar with wait time, which is allowing some time after posing a question for students to respond. Typically, when teachers ask questions of students, they wait one second or less for the student to start a reply. Increasing that wait time to even three seconds has measurable benefits. First, the length of student responses increases. Second, we change the kinds of questions we ask. We ask more process questions, less product questions. And finally, the previously invisible students become visible. By this, I mean those students who seldom speak up. There are some students who always seem to have their hand up immediately, but many of our students need more time to process their thoughts. Longer wait times provide the opportunity and incentive to apply their thinking skills. What also really helps here are turn and talks or think pair shares, where after a teacher poses a question, the students turn to someone to share their thinking before opening it up to the whole group. This increases the chance that every student will have had an opportunity to think about and respond to the question. What is less often known is the importance of increasing a wait time after a student responds to a question. Increasing this time results in students asking more questions, and there is also a marked increase in student-to-student exchanges. They actually begin listening to each other. So along with this, I also started working on how often I've re-voiced my students' ideas. Why should students bother listening to each other if they knew I would be repeating it anyways? So instead of immediately restating a student's contribution, I allowed it to linger in the increased wait time. Quite often this resulted in another student spontaneously restating it themselves. So what you're saying is, or I would prompt it myself by asking for someone to rephrase it for the whole class. I saved my own re-voicing opportunities for those times when there was particular mathematics language I wanted to reinforce. To open up the conversational space, I also became very attentive to my position in the classroom. If a student near me was talking, I would move to the opposite side of the room so that the conversational space was expanded to include all of the children, rather than become a conversation between me and the child. If a quiet child wished to speak, I came closer to encourage them to begin, but slowly moved away as they spoke. Invariably, their voice would rise in volume without the humiliation of being told to speak up because no one can hear you. Wait time and re-voicing are such seemingly simple changes that they have had a powerful impact on my practice. By listening to my students, I not only give them the opportunity to develop deep understanding, but I also find I am better able to develop insight into what they know and how they think.