Students who don’t listen don’t learn well. They don’t understand content or tasks, fail to follow instructions and misbehave. They gradually lose confidence in their teacher and in their own ability to learn.
When this happens, we are often too quick to reduce the amount of listening children are expected to do. This means they get worse at it, which can create a vicious cycle.
To avoid this situation, we shouldn’t be reducing listening; we should be teaching students to listen better.
Here are four pieces of advice on how to do this:
- Explain what good listening looks like
Some children understand that good listening means reading along, engaging with explanations, making notes where needed and asking questions at the right time. Others just think it means being a bit quieter, which often results in daydreaming, whispering, fiddling and doodling. These students can become argumentative when challenged because their understanding of listening is not the same as ours.
Build a shared understanding of good listening by explaining expectations and then embedding them. If a student isn’t listening properly, stop, challenge them and start again. This is exhausting to begin with, but children will tune in before long.
- Improve your subject knowledge
Many children think lessons are boring because they don’t listen to the content of them. When they say they are bored by the subject, what they really mean is they are bored of sitting quietly while their teacher bangs on.
The best way to keep children listening is to be interesting and the easiest way to be interesting is to know lots about what you’re teaching. I don’t like to listen to people talking about things they know nothing about and nor do children.
- Be clear
Students will stop listening if they don’t understand what we’re talking about so it is important that we pause to check their understanding. Targeted questioning can work well, as can checking written work. If a student doesn’t understand, we shouldn’t ignore it. Go back and explain again.
- Model listening
When teachers ask questions they can sometimes give the impression that they aren’t listening to the answer. Just nodding and saying “good” is too cursory and makes students feel they haven’t really been listened to. And why should they listen if their teacher doesn’t? When students answer your questions, be specific in your responses. Say what you like about good answers or explain why incorrect ones are wrong.
- Insist on students listening to each other
If a child isn’t listening to a peer or interrupts them, we should deal with this in just the same way we would if it was done to us. We should also encourage our students to respond to what their classmates say. By doing this we allow students to see that they can learn from lots of different people if they only listen to them properly.
Ben Newmark is head of humanities and a teacher of history at New College Leicester
Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow TES on Twitter and like TES on Facebook
