So far, you have:

• Looked at your students through the lens of the Listening learning grid
• Gained a sense of what becoming better at listening looks like
• Considered how you might shift the culture of the classroom to nurture listening

Now we look more closely at classroom activities and language to provoke and guide students to become better at listening; to build the phases of listening mindedness.

Learn more about listening from our article on listening from our website.

Now go to the phase that you have already identified as the one that most of your students need to develop next.

In each Tab box below you will find; an overview of the teacher’s role; a couple of  ‘quick wins’ or introductory activities; a couple of activities to surface listening; some suggestions for teacher talk and If- Then statements; a learning mat.

As teachers, we are in the habit-forming business. Those habits that we model in front of young people influence the ways in which they perform and behave. Therefore, we need to be sure to foster productive learning habits. If we frequently repeat ourselves, we are not building our students’ listening habits. In such ways do good teachers, albeit inadvertently, stifle the habit of listening.

Activity 2: How well does my classroom climate encourage Listening?

A classroom climate that supports and nourishes the habit of  listening attentively is characterised by an understanding of what listening is about and an empathetic interest in the views, values and emotions of others.

To develop a listening friendly culture teachers need to believe that:

• Effective listening is an essential life skill that benefits learning at school, in family relationships and later, in life at work
• Attentive, active listening is an acquired skill that can be trained and needs to be practised
• Listening and being quiet are not the same.

And through such a listening friendly culture students will come to believe that:

• In order to understand, I first need to listen
• Listening is not about waiting for my turn to talk
• I need to listen for what’s not said as well as what is said.

Get a feel for your classroom culture and how it may be working for or against students becoming increasingly willing and able to listen.
Look through the ideas carefully and consider whether you already use some and whether any appeal to you to try.

Activity 2 Classroom Climate for Listening

1a) What do we mean by Listening?

Empathy and listening are core skills. We bracket them together because listening is the main medium through which empathy is generated and communicated. Students can quite readily be coached in the art of being a good listener, and can be given games and exercises that help them develop the ability to hear what someone else has said and, if necessary, play it back to them. Teachers sometimes complain that students will not listen, either to them or to each other; but the habit of listening can be cultivated in most classes inside a term. The most powerful way to do this is for the teachers to model good listening.
Extract from Building Learning Power. Guy Claxton 2002

1b) What does being a good Listener involve?

Understanding how to listen effectively is an essential skill that benefits everything from family life to business. It’s one of the most critical skills for working effectively in teams. Hearing and listening are different. Whereas hearing is a automatic and effortless process when sound waves strike the ear drum  and cause vibrations in the brain, listening is about the brain giving those sounds meaning. It’s unnatural, and it requires effort. There’s all sorts of faulty listening. Sometimes we fake it or pretend to listen; sometimes we only respond to the remarks we are interested in and reject the rest. Sometimes we listen defensively and take innocent remarks as personal attacks. Or, we listen to collect information to use to attack the speaker, or we avoid particular topics, or we listen insensitively and can’t look beyond the words for other meanings, or we  turn the conversation to ourselves. So, listening is indeed hard and requires effort. To be a good listener you need  to be able to listen for information,  listen to judge the quality of the information and listen empathetically to build a relationship and help solve a problem. When looked at from these diverse angles growing Listening moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘do good listening’.

The Listening grid below takes account of the constituent parts of building the habit of being a good listener.

Our progression grid for Listening has 6 components:

1c) Unpicking the columns; what contributes to effective listening?

1d) Unpicking the rows; getting better at Listening

Of course, the development of Listening doesn’t grow neatly up each column or evenly across the phases in the grid. The five broad phases of dispositional growth (purple – orange) are affective ways in which people may be inclined to behave: we call this inclination ‘mindedness’.

Building Reflectiveness

Being ready, willing and able to become more strategic about learning. Reflectiveness: The strategic aspects of learning (Managing).

Planning

Working learning out in advance

Revising

Monitoring and adapting along the way

Distilling

Drawing out the lessons from experience

Meta-learning

Understanding learning, and yourself as a learner

Reciprocity

Being ready, willing and able to learn alone and with others. The social aspects of learning (Relating)

Interdependence

Balancing self-reliance and sociability

Collaboration

The skills of learning with others

Empathy and Listening

Getting inside others’ minds

Imitation

Picking up others’ habits and values

Building Resourcefulness

Being ready, willing and able to learn in different ways. The cognitive aspects of learning (Thinking).

Questioning

Getting below the surface; being curious

Making Links

Seeking coherence, relevance and meaning

Imagining

Using the mind’s eye as a learning theatre

Reasoning

Thinking rigorously and methodically

Capitalising

Making good use of resources

1a Culture tool 1

1b. Looking back: getting closer to the action

1c and d Analysis and Evaluation

2.1 Activativing pupil voice: up close and personal

2.2 Activating pupil voice: at a distance

3.1 Take a focussed learning amble

1a A Culture for Learning

1b and c Analysis and Evaluation

Bridging the gap in teaching

A learning friendly culture

 a. Relating for learning

b. Talking for learning

c. Constructing learning

d. Celebrating learning

Where is my classroom culture now?

• Download the deeper Learning Culture tool 2 and Learning Culture Review sheet.
• Look carefully at the Culture tool 2 in relation to your classroom.
• Ring the statements which describe aspects of the culture that you think are secure.
• Underline in red those statements that would most benefit your students now.
• Record your analysis and musings on the Learning Culture Review sheet.
• Please take the results of these tasks with you to the Professional Learning Team session shown in Section 4

Culture Tool 1

This section is for those teachers who are undertaking this unit alone and are not part of a Teacher Learning Community structure. The section provides well researched ways for planning and reflecting on your changing classroom practice

When teachers want or need to improve it actually involves them in changing their teaching habits. It’s not just about knowing new stuff, like reading the previous sections, it is about doing what you do differently. That’s much harder. It involves changes to;

• what you know – knowledge
• what you believe – feelings or attitudes
• what you can do – your skills
• what you actually do – putting it all into practice

So changing how you teach is a delicate, complex process……...that’s why it’s hard!

And the hardest thing isn’t getting new ideas into teachers’ heads

It’s getting the old ones out…….that’s why it takes time and effort.

It takes time and practice to undo old habits and become graceful at new ones……that’s why we have provided materials here to help you to plan the changes you want to make, monitor what happens in your classroom as the changes happen, and reflect on the impact of those changes; their worth and value.

This section offers a framework for supporting a productive Teacher Learning Community

Teacher learning communities have the potential to provide you, as teachers and support staff, with the information and support you need to develop your practice in deep and lasting ways. They provide a forum for supporting you in converting the information and ideas in the online learning sessions into “lived” practices within your specific subjects and classrooms. They provide a safe forum in which to;

• kick around ideas from the online content,
• unpack it’s meaning when it’s unclear,
• consider what’s do-able and appropriate for your pupils
• make plans for what and how you might incorporate the ideas into your practice
• share and unpack what you have tried in the classroom
• relate your triumphs and tribulations
• support colleagues through changes in practice
• reflect on what you hope you might do, or have done, differently

 The format of the agenda is based on research into teacher learning communities by Dylan Wiliam, of Assessment for Learning (AfL) fame. Teacher learning communities are the engines of teacher development. 

Reflect on where you are now.

To what extent do your learners take responsibility for their learning?

Teachers as habit formers.

As teachers we are in the habit-forming business. Those habits that we model in front of young people influence the ways in which they perform and behave. Therefore, we need to be sure to foster productive learning habits. If, for example, we help students too much, they become overly reliant and dependent on us. If, on the other hand we expect too much of them and fail to support when necessary, they may begin to lose their trust in us to help them to do their best.

In such ways can good teachers, albeit inadvertently, stifle the very behaviours they are seeking to promote.

 The pros and the cons

As with most things, devolving responsibility to students may be a double-edged sword. On the plus side, students who accept and rise to these increased levels of responsibility become increasingly able to steer their own learning development. On the other hand, many students (and their parents) see their learning development as our responsibility and not something that they have the experience or knowledge to do for themselves. As one Governor, many years ago, said to a school proposing to devolve more responsibility to learners that ‘it sounds like the inmates are taking over the asylum’ !

Activity: How do students see themselves as learners?

Have a quick think about how your students see themselves in the learning relationship between you and them. 

Sharing responsibility – how relationships may change.

An important way of devolving or sharing responsibility for learning is to let students do more of it, to become more active in the learning process. Active learners are not only offered more opportunities to decide what to do, but are also actively learning by explicitly reviewing of their own experience.

As Weimar (2002) warns us:

“The more structured we make the environment the more structure the students need.
The more we decide for students the more they expect us to decide.
The more motivation we provide the less they find within themselves.
The more responsibility for learning we try to assume the less they accept on their own.
The more control we exert the more restive their response.”

As teachers begin to share responsibility, they work towards students:

•  making more choices about what and how to learn (high levels of learner autonomy)
•  experiencing failure as a necessary and useful part of learning 
•  using strategies for getting themselves out of difficulty and stuckness
•  being given a chance to talk more – and adults talking less
•  experiencing more open-ended activities – and creating their own
•  having more opportunity to spend longer on an activity, to feed their interest/engagement in it
•  establishing high-level goals for their own learning, based on challenge and quality feedback, including their own
•  having access to learning experiences that are under- rather than over engineered, with elements of ambiguity
•  deciding on success criteria / admissible outcomes

This shift to more learner involvement offers deep professional satisfaction and a new set of learning relationships. At its heart, it requires students to do more for themselves as they slowly develop the skills and attitudes necessary for a lifetime of self-directed learning.

This section is for those teachers who are undertaking this unit alone and are not part of a Teacher Learning Community structure. The section provides well researched ways for planning and reflecting on your changing classroom practice

When teachers want or need to improve it actually involves them in changing their teaching habits. It’s not just about knowing new stuff, like reading the previous sections, it is about doing what you do differently. That’s much harder. It involves changes to;

• what you know – knowledge
• what you believe – feelings or attitudes
• what you can do – your skills
• what you actually do – putting it all into practice

So changing how you teach is a delicate, complex process……...that’s why it’s hard!

And the hardest thing isn’t getting new ideas into teachers’ heads

It’s getting the old ones out…….that’s why it takes time and effort.

It takes time and practice to undo old habits and become graceful at new ones……that’s why we have provided materials here to help you to plan the changes you want to make, monitor what happens in your classroom as the changes happen, and reflect on the impact of those changes; their worth and value.

This section offers a framework for supporting a productive Teacher Learning Community

Teacher learning communities have the potential to provide you, as teachers and support staff, with the information and support you need to develop your practice in deep and lasting ways. They provide a forum for supporting you in converting the information and ideas in the online learning sessions into “lived” practices within your specific subjects and classrooms. They provide a safe forum in which to;

• kick around ideas from the online content,
• unpack it’s meaning when it’s unclear,
• consider what’s do-able and appropriate for your pupils
• make plans for what and how you might incorporate the ideas into your practice
• share and unpack what you have tried in the classroom
• relate your triumphs and tribulations
• support colleagues through changes in practice
• reflect on what you hope you might do, or have done, differently

 The format of the agenda is based on research into teacher learning communities by Dylan Wiliam, of Assessment for Learning (AfL) fame. Teacher learning communities are the engines of teacher development.