Paying attention to awkward silences has made me a better teacher and collaborator

From ScienceMag:

A few years ago, I left a faculty meeting feeling reassured by how smoothly the conversation had gone. We discussed a project that would bring psychologists like me together with speech pathologists and health researchers to evaluate a rehabilitation program for stroke and other neurological conditions. Around the table, everyone used the same terminology and the discussion moved efficiently from one idea to the next. I took that fluency as evidence that we understood one another. But when the time came to translate our ideas into actual research plans, I was surprised to realize we had been talking past one another. We had mistaken shared jargon for shared understanding.

Early in my career, I’d absorbed the lesson that fluency equals comprehension. In academia, we are trained to value quick answers, polished explanations, and intellectual confidence. As a graduate student, I often felt pressure to fill the silent gap after
the professor had asked a question. Once, a classmate stopped me in the hallway and said, “You always seem to know exactly what to say.” At the time, I took it as a great compliment. I began to equate quick, confident responses with understanding itself.

Years later, that meeting with my colleagues made me question my assumptions. And I noticed the same pattern in a workshop I was teaching for psychology and exercise science students. When I posed theoretical questions, the psychology students responded quickly and confidently. But I saw several exercise science students furrowing their brows and glancing uncertainly at one another. When the discussion shifted to athletes’ real-world performance, the dynamic reversed. Exercise science students spoke fluently about muscle fatigue, progressive overload, and recovery cycles, whereas the psychology students became quieter, shifting in their seats as they tried to follow.

Each group sounded highly competent—until they had to explain their reasoning to the others. When that happened, the room filled with a silence that made me anxious. My instinct was to intervene immediately—to clarify, rephrase, provide structure, rescue the conversation before it became uncomfortable.

Midway through the workshop, I changed my approach. I asked students to explain a core concept from their field in a way anyone could understand. At first, almost no one spoke. Then came tentative attempts. Half-finished explanations. Students began to question each other as they revised their wording. One exercise science student abandoned technical language about recovery cycles and simply explained, “If the body never gets time to adapt, performance eventually drops instead of improving.” The psychology students began to connect the idea to stress, burnout, and cognitive overload. Gradually, the energy in the room changed. The students were no longer looking to me for confirmation. They were negotiating meaning together.

This experience changed how I approached my own collaborations. At a later meeting for the rehab project, I noticed our group repeatedly using the word “engagement” as though we all meant the same thing. I paused the discussion and asked each person to describe the term’s meaning within their field. For one colleague, engagement referred to clinicians’ verbal participation during training sessions. For another, it referred to patients’ adherence to their treatment plan. As an educational psychologist, I thought of engagement largely in terms of what was happening internally—whether people were genuinely motivated and actively processing what they were learning. What initially sounded like agreement was several distinct meanings hidden within a shared term. The conversation slowed once we realized this, but we ultimately designed a better research project because we finally understood where our perspectives diverged.

I teach, collaborate, and listen differently now. In my classes, I have become more comfortable allowing pauses, uncertainty, and unfinished explanations to remain in the room long enough for students to work through them and confront what they really mean. In interdisciplinary collaborations, I spend less time trying to move conversations efficiently toward agreement and more time paying attention to the awkward silences that indicate understanding has begun to break down. When a conversation slows, I no longer see it as a sign of failure. I see it as evidence that we are finally doing the harder work of understanding one another.

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