Are you listening?

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
— Karl Menninger

There is a little quiz going around on the Internet in which you are asked to draw various body parts on to a cat. From your drawing, its size and its location, some pronouncement is made about your character. That was where I learnt that I don’t listen well enough because I had drawn small ears for the cat. Well, perhaps there’s some truth in that. I don’t know but it did help me to be more aware of myself as a listener when I am in the company of friends and family.

I am ashamed to confess that I often complain about poor listeners. You know, the people who need you to repeat your address and your post code 5 times before they can take it down correctly. I often put this down to the fact that in school, we encourage our students to develop bad listening habits. No? Well, see how you do on this checklist. You just have to answer yes or no to these questions.

Do you
1. Repeat yourself in class all the time because your students don’t hear everything the first time you said it?

2. Patiently echo the answers as many times as is needed so that all your students at the back of the classroom can hear them?

3. Speak slowly and wait patiently for students to laboriously write down word by word the instructions you are giving orally?

4. Always talk above the noise in the classroom, competing with your students’ chatting instead of waiting for silence first?

5. Often talk when someone else is speaking instead of listening to what is being said and think that this is acceptable practice?

If you said yes to 5 in particular, chances are you condone this practice in your class too. But hey, if you have 3 yeses there, you could just be guilty of helping your students grow up to be poor listeners through your very actions and behaviour.

What can be done? Well, for one, you can read the following:

10 tips for helping students to develop better listening habits.

1. Before giving any instructions to your students, make sure they are all listening to you. Wait if you have to, for them to focus on you before you begin speaking.

2. Never repeat instructions after giving them. Instead ask a couple of students to repeat your instructions to the class. If they get them wrong, have other students correct the information.

3. Speak clearly and don’t rush through your instructions or message. Maintain eye contact with as many pupils as you can by looking around the class. Don’t forget students who are sitting outside your line of vision i.e. those to your extreme left and right.

4. Do not walk around when giving instructions. This can be distracting and your voice may rise and fall, making it hard for students to hear you properly.

5. But on the other hand, it is good to position yourself in different parts of your classroom instead of sticking to the front. This way, you can monitor students better and giving instructions from a different part of the classroom also means that students are able to monitor your movements and learn to be alert to your presence.

6. When instructions are complex, post them on the board instead. Remember that our short term memory can only hold 5-7 bits of information each time.

7. When your students speak to you, listen carefully and maintain eye contact. You need to model what good listening looks like.

8. Expect your students to pay attention when you speak. Talking while the teacher is speaking or teaching is not just rude but students are obviously not paying attention to the lesson.

9. Roles play what good listening looks like with younger children. Ask them to tell you what a good listener does and list such behaviours for students to remember.

10. Finally, at the beginning of every lesson, do not waste time shouting for attention. Instead, write a task on the board immediately and direct students’ attention to it so that they can begin working while you get other students in order.

Since I am on listening, let me add:

5 tips for conducting a more effective listening lesson in the classroom.

1. Always do a pre-listening activity before you begin. Your pre-listening is to help your students anticipate the text to be heard, activate their prior knowledge, and set a focus for their listening. For example, you can tell them that they will be listening to a poem. Then ask them for some things that they should be looking out for if they are listening to a poem. If they are doing a worksheet with questions, have them preview the questions and predict the contents before they begin listening.

2. Always try out your listening text in advance to avoid any fumbling in class. If you have to read out the text, practise reading aloud at a natural pace. You need to read the text in sensible chunks. These should not be too long or too short. Remember how much our short term memory can hold; this will help you determine how big each chunk of text should be. Apart from reading the text at a natural pace, you should also not repeat anything, beyond the stipulated number of times. Don’t yield to students’ begging.

3. Read the text three times only. The first time, students must listen without writing anything. Their main goal is to understand what the text is about first. The second time, they can begin working on the task. Read the text again the third time for students to check their answers and to fill in any blanks. The text can be read twice only if it is short and the task is not too complex.

4. When the listening task is over, do not just focus on checking the answers. You can take the task further by discussing issues related to the topic. Students can also write a response to the topic or draw something to reflect on their understanding or attitude towards the theme. Doing this will help you extend pupils understanding of the theme or topic and help you see how well they have listened to the text. Students can also write a short summary of what they recall of the listening text. These are better indications of students’ listening skills, especially when they only have simple questions or multiple choice items as a listening task.

5. Never allow pupils to see the listening text and study it in advance. This will mean that they don’t have to listen but can just write down everything from memory. This will then not be a listening task but a memory task. All dictation passages must be unseen.
Listening well is an important component to good conversation. Taking the time to teach your students to listen well is something worth doing considering that this is not merely a skill for academic success but also a skill for life.

Finally, here are 3 interesting quotations about listening for you to mull over:

Just because I didn’t do what you told me, doesn’t mean I wasn’t listening to you!
— Hank Ketcham

Man's inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively.
— Carl Rogers

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.— Winston Churchill