Listen to your Heart (and the Teacher): Developing Student Listening Skills

"Listening to Instructions." Retrieved from
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/276619602089214994/

The above teacher meme is facetious, but nonetheless an accurate portrayal of what happens in many classrooms. Listening is a vital life skill and unfortunately, large amounts of students for a variety of reasons are not strong listeners.  Now I’m not here to speculate about why students may be poor listeners, and I’m certainly not going to give the cop-out excuse of the prevalence of technology because let’s not kid ourselves here, children have been getting distracted long before tablets and smartphones came on the scene. What I am here to do is discuss some suggestions of what we can do to help students become better listeners, and thus better communicators and citizens.

            The article “Let’s Talk about Listening” from The Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat on EduGains has some great ideas on activities to help students listening comprehension and ways a teacher can create a listening classroom. I’ve summarized some of the important points below and added some thoughts of my own.

Listening is a Full Body Experience

            It’s not just your student’s ears and mind that should be at work when listening, but their whole body. Teachers mainly in the younger grades (although it is no less important in the higher grades) talk about the concept of “listening bodies,” that is the way your body should look when you’re actually listening to someone. If you’re listening, you usually turned to face the speaker, looking at the speaker, not talking, and if you are moving, you’re making signs that you are hearing the speaker e.g. nodding your head, adjusting your facial expression. Students need to know that this is what they should be doing to help them listen better.

Demonstrate to students what a listening body looks like. Feel free to even get a little silly if that’s what it takes! Ask a student what they did on the weekend, and when he or she starts to talk, turn around and go stare into the corner, Blair Witch style. It’s goofy and exaggerated, but hopefully it will show your students the absurdity of incorrect listening body language.

Pictured: A poor active listener
End of The Blair Witch Project movie still. Retrieved from
http://www.mtv.com/news/1869809/blair-witch-project-15-anniversary/

Mental Checklists

            It takes practice to become good at listening, and it’s an ongoing process. Even the most focused of people sometimes need to check wandering attention if they’re not engaged. Imagine then what it’s like for a student with issues with distractibility or central auditory processing. This is why all listening needs to be taught as a meta-cognitive process. Students should have mental checklists to make sure they’re understand what the speaker is saying. I find with some students who get distracted easily, even a physical checklist can be helpful. If they catch their attention wandering, they put a checkmark down in their notebook.

            Students should also be asking themselves if they understand what’s being said and if they don’t understand, they need to feel free to ask a question. This part is highly dependent on the teacher, because if a teacher shows impatience for questions, then the students will be less encouraged to clarify information with the teacher. What is not acceptable is having to teach the entire lesson all over again because the student wasn’t listening the first time around, but on the whole, questions should not be discouraged. Make sure you establish with your class that you should feel free to ask questions to double-check what they need to do, or to inquire further into a topic they’re interested in.

Model Behaviour

 

"Storybook active listening bodies." Retrieved from
http://www.cwtherapy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/cw19.jpg

           Lead by example. Show students how to be a good listener by listening to them. It doesn’t just have to be through remembering a story they told, or what console they play, but responding to their learning needs in the classroom. Students can be extremely perceptive and they can usually tell right away if you’re someone who cares.

            Listen with your eyes and ears to ensure student understanding of concepts, to figure out if they’re perhaps holding something back or feigning understanding to avoid embarrassment. A teacher who is a good listener will see that and respond accordingly. Little things like that can mean a lot to a struggling student, or any student!

Listening is part of the Oral Communication strand of Literacy in Ontario, but listening skills transfer over into any subject in the classroom, or any interaction the student will have throughout the day. Feel free to do listening activities that are cross-curricular, assessing student listening skills even if what they’re listening to is a social studies podcast.

Apart from the article I mentioned earlier in the post, I also recommend Julian Treasure’s TED talk “5 ways to listen better” if you have 8 minutes to spare (of course you do, don’t lie!). It is an entertaining and direct speech on listening and you can definitely try some of the techniques he suggests with your class.  Learning to listen is a big task, try to have students work on it as much as they can and they will quickly notice the benefits of being more present in the classroom.