Accepting Without Judgment
Nonjudgmental teachers accept what students say and do. When they
accept, they give no clues through posture, gesture, or word whether a stu-
dent’s idea, behavior, or feeling is good, bad, better, worse, right, or wrong.
Nonjudgmentgal acceptance of students’ ideas or actions provides a
psychologically safe place where children can take risks, make decisions
for themselves, and explore the consequences of their actions. Acceptance
provides conditions in which students are encouraged to examine and
compare their own data, values, ideas, criteria, and feelings with others’
as well as the teacher’s.
Mindful teachers use the following four kinds of nonjudgmental
response behaviors to create an atmosphere in which students experience
and practice the Habits of Mind: (1) pausing, (2) paraphrasing, (3) clari-
fying, and (4) providing data. When teachers model these skills, students
also learn how to practice the skills when listening to and responding to
one another.
Pausing.Some teachers dominate classroom talk by asking lower-
level questions at a rapid-fire pace. A teacher may wait less than one sec-
ond after posing a question before doing one of several things: repeating
the question, commenting on a student’s answer, redirecting the question
to a new student, answering the question, or starting a new questioning
sequence. In these kinds of exchanges, student answers are often terse or
fragmentary, or the student’s tone of voice may show a lack of confidence.
Students have little opportunity for second thoughts or to extend their
ideas. Many teachers appear programmed to accept only one, predeter-
mined, “right” answer. They leave little room for alternate answers or dif-
fering opinions. Students receive the message that “the teacher’s way of
knowing is the onlyway of knowing.”
Silence, or wait time, is one answer to this situation. Mary Budd Rowe
(1969, 1974) first explored the concept of wait time in the late 1960s. Dur-
ing classroom observations, she noticed that some teachers used “pur-
poseful pauses” as they conducted lessons and class discussions. In these
classrooms, she noted students making speculations, holding sustained
conversational sequences, posing alternative explanations, and arguing
over the interpretation of data. She also noted positive changes in the
106 Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind