As teachers, we all feel the pressure of time, the urgency of packing everything we know we should be teaching into the time frame of a lesson. Even lessons longer than 30 minutes can feel far too short for all we’d like to include. One outcome of this feeling is a nearly overwhelming urge to jump in to even short silences with words or actions: answering ourselves, rewording questions, offering new analogies or images, repeating ourselves, giving verbal or played hints.
