BPL Listening

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners Phase 2. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to expand your students’ use of learning behaviours.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become more skilled in developing your students’ use of learning power.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

• Essential Read …essential must read text.
• Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

This unit explores the “how” of building listening.

• What are the key aspects of listening? (Essential Read about 1)
• How confident are my students now as listeners? (Find out 1)
• How could I embed building listening into my teaching? (Find out 2)
• What sort of approaches may be useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
• Estimate my students’ development using a detailed listening chart (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so will enable them to extend the range of learning behaviours that they use consciously.

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’.

A well formed Listening habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

• Be genuinely interested in other people and what they are saying;
• Focus on the current moment, being attentive and responsive to visual cues and atmosphere;
• Notice subtle details and nuances in what is being said;
• Know when to make well-judged interventions to elucidate, probe or challenge;
• Manage distractions constructively;
• Be comfortable with silence and attend actively to what is being said.

The listening progression chart should give you a fairly clear view of the listening behaviours and how your students do, and do not, currently exhibit them.

• The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple or blue phase)
• You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
• But some students will appear to have made general progress even in learning behaviours not spotlighted earlier.

The chart alongside shows how listening grows. Column 1 identifies the 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

A word of warning.

While you may be tempted to focus your efforts on the majority for greatest impact, you’ll need to take care not to do so at the expense of your ‘grey’ students, as these are your potential underachievers in the future.

What to look for.

In Try Outs 1 to 5, look out for teaching ideas that you think will have the greatest impact on your particular group of learners. Don’t attempt to try all of the ideas – better to do a few thoroughly than to adopt a scattergun approach.

Culture is the curriculum of the classroom, frequently hidden from the external observer, but always all evident to learners. It is the minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day way that learners come to understand their role as a learner. Culture is your enacted values in the classroom – what you do and what you do not do, what you say and do not say, what you believe and do not believe, what you value and do not value.

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage listening.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture.

It’s worth noting that the list is made up of the four action types you first met last year in the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 2);

• ways of giving students more responsibility for their learning
• the sort of language you might use to stimulate listening
• ideas for constructing lessons to build listening
• ways of celebrating listening

Ask yourself which of the features of the listening-friendly classroom are:

• already a consistent feature of your classroom?
• an occasional feature of your classroom?
• rarely evident in your classroom?

Which of these features are you interested in developing further?

At this point it might be worth having an informal chat with some of your colleagues. Is anyone already making progress with one of the features you would like to work on? Do you have any consistent features that others might learn from? Take your completed sheet to discuss at the meeting at the end of this unit.

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Listening.

Begin with the ‘stop/avoid’ box – if any of these teaching behaviours are still in evidence in your classroom it would be worth thinking through how they can be eliminated, since failure to do so will undermine the changes you are hoping to achieve for your learners

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility for listening towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for listening (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate and develop listening (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how listening can be recognised/ rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Understanding facial expression

Making faces

Experiment with facial expressions, asking students to show their feelings when they:

• step in a pool of mud
• eat a chocolate
• watch a dance

Discuss whether everyone reacts in the same way. Show photos of different expressions. Discuss what the people in them might be feeling and why. Paint pictures to express particular feelings and discuss the use of colour in relation to emotional content.

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

1. What does the tone of voice tell you about the person?
2. Close your eyes and let the sounds wash over you.
3. Can you hear what she’s really saying?
4. Listen for the main messages. Can you summarise the key points of what you’ve just heard.
5. How does what he’s saying make you feel?
6. Wait for your turn to talk.
7. How can you help XXX to say what they are thinking?
8. Do you think there’s a deeper meaning in what is being said?
9. How can you show empathy for the speaker in your responses?
10. Do you understand the mood and beliefs of the speaker?

Listening for a purpose is about sharing the reason for or purpose of listening. At an early stage it’s about making the distinction between hearing and listening; saying why we are listening and what we are listening for.

With younger pupils this may just involve talking about what we do when we listen rather than just hear.

For older pupils its about being clear about the specific purpose of listening…what to listen for as part of the learning objective. For example you may give students specific questions at the start of a lesson, expect them to listen for the answers in the lesson input and require them to answer the questions later in a reflection journal.

For more sophisticated listeners.

Explain and discuss the five preferred listening styles that can be used in response to different circumstances:

• Appreciative: enjoying what is being said and how it is being said in a relaxed way
• Empathic: responding to the feelings expressed with sympathy and understanding
• Discerning: focusing on information, making notes and avoiding distractions
• Comprehensive: relating what is said to what they know already, asking questions, preparing arguments
• Evaluative: critiquing what is being said and building counter arguments

Set up ANY lesson with a specific listening purpose. For example, to discern facts; to note down new knowledge; to generate counter arguments; to critique what was said.

Use post-listening activities to evaluate students’ listening skills and their ability to transfer the use of listening strategies to other contexts.

Self monitoring listening in action.

Introducing a new learning behaviour every month or so is trickier than it seems.

• You might concentrate on it in say three or four lessons.
• You will bring it to the fore in your talk.
• But how do you get students to pick up all the aspects of the behaviour?
• How might you ensure they see its usefulness in lessons in general?
• How do you ensure they absorb the use of the behaviour into how they learn?

A learning mat

Use a learning mat for listening to ensure students monitor their own use of the behaviour.

Learning mats are usually A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Students refer to them during lessons, using them as prompts about the finer aspects of a learning habit that is being stretched. This tool helps students to be able to join in meta-cognitive talk.

Build listening by considering it in greater depth

The chart alongside offers a deeper view of how Listening may grow.

Column one is about how we move from the convention of taking turns when listening rather than hogging a conversation, to being curious and respecting the speaker, moving on to listening actively and picking up intentions and emotions in the speaker and knowing how best to respond when people think differently, both from yourself and others, in a conversation

Column two is about self-talk; what students may be saying to themselves in growing their self-awareness about listening. We show a small flavour of self-talk thoughts that teachers can encourage students to imitate. Some relate to understanding the message while others relate to responding to the speaker. All such self-talk is important in building a listening habit.

Column three is about the ‘how’ of listening. Understanding information, being open to finding the essence of the message, the big ideas and main points; asking questions to gain more information (closed and open) and paraphrasing to check what was meant. And finally listening between the lines, looking beyond the words to find meaning.

Column four is about judging the quality of the message and deciding whether to accept or reject it. This moves from concentrating on listening, not making a judgement too early and separating the message from the speaker, ignoring information that may lead you to verbally attack the speaker. It’s important through sensitive questioning to evaluate the speaker’s credibility and check the source of the information. Conversations may then move on to examining the evidence before making a decision to accept or reject the argument/ information/idea. Finally being able to respond empathetically when rejecting an idea with your counter arguments.

The last column is about empathetic listening and helping people to sort out problems. This style of listening demands showing respect for another person’s point of view. Your role is to question in order to sort out problems, offer supportive responses, prompt the speaker to make suggestions for themselves and paraphrase their words to check understanding. It’s the hardest listening skill of all and takes a great deal of practice

Take a look at the chart and see if you can plot where the majority of your students are now.

Which aspects do they find more tricky?

How has the chart helped you to understand the development of listening more fully?

Suggested meeting agenda

1. Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
2. Discuss what you have found out about students’ use of listening (15 mins)
3. Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
4. Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
5. Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

To share your experiments with others and to enable senior leaders to maintain an overview of developments, please complete this proforma termly and hand it to the Building Powerful Learners coordinator.

To give you a flavour, an example of a completed proforma is in the Noticing unit. Click below to download and print a blank version for yourself.