Making split-second decisions

The act of teaching is essentially instant decision-making which will either increase or decrease learning.

If you teach younger students, often your decisions will involve dealing with misbehaviour.  If a kid throws a paper airplane while you're giving your lesson, you need to decide right then what you will do about it.  Even if you decide not to do anything, that's still a decision; and make no mistake, everyone, including the perpetrator will learn from whatever you decide ("oh he's easy", "she's mean!")

If you teach older students, the decisions usually involve academic knowledge.  If a student asks you the meaning of a word in English, do you translate it? Ask him to look it up?  Ask everyone to look it up?  Why?  Again, there mnay be no right or wrong choice, but whatever you decide will impact the student's learning in some way.

The biggest challenge facing teachers, then, is the issue of TIME: you have to decide instantly.  Putting off a decision is a decision too. 

It may be that if we had more time to make decisions, we'd make better ones.

So how can we buy ourselves more time to decide?