What My Students’ Silences Taught Me More Than Their Answers - A Collaborative Account

By Huynh Trang Tuan Tuong, UG student, and Mary Moschou, staff, University of the West of England (UWE Bristol)

How this began

After a few years in academia, I realised I missed working with students in a genuinely collaborative way. Not supervising, assessing or leading sessions with predefined outcomes, but creating something together because it felt worthwhile. A space with no grades attached.

I was looking for collaboration without hierarchy. No familiar dynamic of “I am the lecturer, you are the student, and I will decide where this goes.” So I put out a call, inviting students to work with me on this very piece.

Soon after, Tuong’s email landed in my inbox.

Tuong is an undergraduate student in English Literature. Here, he also draws on his experience as a Teaching Assistant at International University, Vietnam. I am Mary, a Lecturer in Mathematics. On paper, our disciplines sit far apart. In practice, we found ourselves circling the same question:

Silence.

From two different positions, a Mathematics lecturer and an English Literature student who has stood at the front of a classroom, we reflect on the silences we encounter in learning spaces. We ask what they mean and how they are experienced depending on perspective.

Our aim isn’t to resolve silence, but to sit with it and ask what becomes possible when it’s no longer treated as a problem to be fixed.

What my students’ silences taught me more than their answers

When I was still a teaching assistant at International University, silence, in my mind, meant something had gone wrong: “Were my lessons boring?”, “Were my questions flopped?”, “Were my lectures quietly dissolving in front of students who suddenly found the ceiling or ground fascinating?”

Like many teachers, I panicked. I repeated the question. Then rephrased it. Then answered it while pretending this part was always in the lesson plan! The classroom would fall silent like a Zoom meeting where everyone’s mic is “accidentally” muted!

In my early teaching days, silence triggered the same reaction as a fire alarm. Too hard? Too boring? Too obvious? But silences aren’t broken microphones. They are more like loading screens!

The silence in my (Tuong) critical thinking class at International University

Silence as a superhero wearing a mask

Once, I asked an excellent student a difficult question and I was certain she could answer it. She sat in silence like phones at 1% battery, alive but not responding. Later, I asked if she hadn’t understood. She laughed. “No, I knew the answer. I just didn’t want everyone to hear my accent.”

That silence wasn’t confusion. It was protection.

I understood her. In the past, I too stayed silent even when I knew the answer. I worried that standing out would lead to jealousy. Sometimes I pretended not to know.

Some students come from cultures where speaking without permission is considered disrespectful. To them, my “Anyone? Anything?” sounded less like an invitation and more like a trap. Their silence was not disengagement. It was good manners in their country’s belief.

What silence finally taught us. A collaborative reflective account

Over time, we stopped treating silence as an emergency. We updated the task. Writing before speaking, working in pairs before presenting in class. Sometimes, we named the silence: “Let’s take a moment to think!”. As Hanh (2020) suggests, students often need time to process before responding.

And sometimes, we did nothing at all. Let silence occur.

Students’ silences helped us realise that teaching isn’t about extracting answers like teeth. It’s about building spaces where voices are welcome and quietness isn’t “kicked out”. Silence taught us to listen; not just for sound, but for meaning.

As Bosacki (2005) reminds us, silence can be read as exclusion, social anxiety, invisibility, indifference, or deep academic commitment. The same outward stillness can hold entirely different inner worlds.

So, what is our role as educators in HE? Should we be trained only in our disciplines, or also in the psychology that helps us interpret what we see and what we don’t? And is it realistic to expect both?

Perhaps that deserves a full piece of its own.

 An AI-generated image (ChatGPT), when

prompted with the theme of this reflective piece

Authors

Huynh Trang Tuan Tuong is a 3^rd year UG student of the BA (Hons) in English Literature at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol).

Dr. Mary Moschou is a Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol).

Reference

Hanh, N. T. (2020). Silence Is Gold?: A Study on Students' Silence in EFL Classrooms.

International Journal of Higher Education, 9(4), 153-160.

Bosacki, S. L. (2005). The culture of classroom silence (Vol. 31). Peter Lang.