Plotinsky, M. (2019, December 12). Making Deep Thinking the Norm. Retrieved January 15, 2020.

Whenever I ask students a question and they respond with a long silence, I start to worry about a few things. I worry about the quality of my question, I worry about whether I’m being fair, and I worry about whether I should swoop in at some point and provide clarification. But most of all, I worry about whether all of the kids in the room are staring at me because I’m asking them to do something hard: to sit and think about ideas that are not clear-cut, that can’t be answered by scrolling through a smartphone.