The Skillful Teacher

The Teacher’s Doing All the Talking
Students won’t bother to say anything if they know you’re going to
do the job for them. If you always answer your own questions, if you
interrupt students all the time, if you’re the first to fill silence with
your voice, then students will soon learn that they don’t need to
speak. Your conversation with yourself is quite sufficient to fill up
the class time.
The answer to this problem is deceptively simple—stop talking
so much! Enforce a decent wait time on yourself (try twenty seconds
initially) after you have raised a question for consideration. Or, when
assigning group conversational roles, make sure you play one of the
less loquacious ones. Alternatively, tell the group at the outset of
the discussion that you will function only as a facilitator who will
make sure ground rules are observed and that everyone has a chance
to talk, but that you will not interject any substantive opinions into
the conversation.