8. Listening – Listening carefully
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’ or ‘now listen carefully’.
How well does your classroom climate encourage Listening? ⬇️
Does my classroom climate encourage Listening?
Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage listening.
The diagram has 4 sections:
- Top – strategies you could build into the way you teach to stimulate listening;
- Right – indications of the sort of language you might use to stimulate listening;
- Bottom – ways in which you might celebrate / praise students’ attentive listening;
- Left – things that you need to enable students to do.
Apply your own noticing and consider whether you already use any of these features and which you fancy trying.
Bridging the gaps – teaching ideas to cultivate Listening
Teaching ideas to move learners from Blue to Green ⬇️
What you are trying to help your students to achieve
In the Values (green) phase, students listen more deeply for both the message/idea and the emotions that might go with it. They are able to check what is being said through paraphrasing and check the quality of an idea by checking for evidence and reasoning questions. They are aware that the speaker must be treated civilly and can empathise with the person’s view without necessarily agreeing with it.
Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:
Devolve responsibility for listening… by helping students to show empathy for other’d views when they may not agree with them
Talk about listening…by encouraging students to paraphrase what is being said to check understanding
Give students opportunities to practise listening…by allowing time to think about the quality of messages and check for evidence
Celebrate listening… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use
1. Devolve responsibility for listening
Centring Activities
Use centring activities at the beginning of lessons to focus minds before the learning begins. Play music and ask students to focus on the associations that it conjures about places, people, moods and atmospheres.
2. Talk for listening
Practice paraphrasing
- Give directions and ask various students to retell those directions to the class or to their neighbour.
- Ask students to paraphrase stories read to the class
- Show movies clips to the class and require students to paraphrase the action. Helped by introducing note-taking skills.
- Use a longer term version of story telling by requiring students to paraphrase the stories later in a reflection journal.
Have students form groups and share and assess their paraphrasing efforts.
3. Give students opportunities to practise listening
Use Visible Thinking Routines
What did (s)he say ?
This routine helps students to listen carefully for and to understand important factual information. It also encourages them to distil key points as they listen for key messages. The routine has two questions:
- What are the big ideas ?
- What are the big ideas in your own words ?
The natural place to use this routine is before students are about to listen to something – it could be a video, a You Tube clip, or even teacher exposition. The routine works just as well with small groups or individually.
Silent Film Show
Play a two-minute scene from a film, without the visuals.
Listen for clues in sound effects, voices, soundtrack.
Predict / speculate what is happening.
Show the film and attend to the way in which sounds contributed to meaning.
4. Celebrate listening
Adapt and use the list below as:
- A Wall display
- A learning mat (self-monitoring tool)
- A focus for a discussion on listening
- A meta-cognitive listening checklist
- A university/workplace preparation-interview observation checklist.
What does a well-formed listening habit look like?
- Being genuinely interested in what other people are saying – engaging with them with curiosity and engagement
- Being comfortable with silence and patiently attending to what is being said
- Making well-judged interventions to elucidate, probe or challenge
- Managing distractions constructively and focusing on the current moment
- Attending to visual cues and atmospheres
- Noticing details and nuances
- Making links with other experiences and contexts
- Hearing between the lines of what is being said – drawing inferences
- Being socially aware – respecting and valuing the contribution of other individuals.
Teaching ideas to move learners from Purple to Blue ⬇️
What you are trying to help your students to achieve
In the Responds (blue) phase, students have a genuine interest in what is being said. They want to know more, they can sort out what the speaker is saying and from this interest they don’t attempt to turn the conversation to themselves. They have learned the important skill of decoupling the information from the messenger.
Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:
Devolve responsibility for listening… by offering opportunities for students to show curiosity in what people say
Talk about listening…by exploring how to show/indicate that they care about the speaker
Give students opportunities to practise listening…by listening for the key messages of information
Celebrate listening… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use
1. Devolve responsibility for listening
Discuss listening and tone of voice.
Model different tones of voice. Start with ones that are easy to recognise and understand, like a cross voice or a scared one. Gradually build up this repertoire of voices and use them in stories and songs. Talk about when we use these different tones of voice and why. Ask the children to listen carefully to the way people talk at different times and spot their feelings.
Expand further by inventing voices that you can use for different activities: imagine the voices for different toys or puppets you may have in the classroom; count like robots of a day; recite a rhyme like the big bad wolf. The children will have fun inventing a wide and wonderful assortment of voices whilst refining their listening skills.
2. Talk for listening
Expand the listening vocabulary
Collect words that tell you how people learn to listen attentively.
Relate listening to well-known sayings
What do we mean when we say …
Being all ears
Listening between the lines
3. Give students opportunities to practise listening
Practice listening for inference and understanding
A) Explore sentences spoken with different stress, tone, pace and emphasis, to yield different meanings.
For example:
- ‘I don’t know why you didn’t go.’
- ‘How can I answer that?’
B) Play recordings of, for example:
- One end of a telephone conversation: Who’s on the other end… What’s being said… How do you know?
- A dialogue: What’s just happened… What happens next… How do you know?
- Recognisable people: Who are they… What’s the evidence… How do you know?
- Unknown individuals talking: What do you know… Who could they be… How do you know?
C) Read a sentence or statement without expression, then read it again, once, with changes; no further repetition. Students have to spot the changes.
Listen and Draw
A short and enjoyable task that can only be achieved through careful explanation and attentive listening. Use it to stimulate a discussion about jumping to conclusions based on partial information.
Coaching Notes
Learning Challenge
Build active listening – so that students listen for themselves
Individuals are assigned an active listening role before an input. After the input, participants with the same role meet to discuss their findings. Groups are then reorganised to contain one person of each role. The groups then review the input from various angles. Individuals could be challenged to do one of:
- summarise any new information;
- clarify – ask questions for clarification;
- identify and prioritise – identify key points and put them in order of priority;
- apply the information – give examples of practical applications;
- relate information to what they already know;
- identify areas of disagreement – in order to open discussion.
4. Celebrate listening
Make reflecting on listening part of everyday lessons
Learning Mats
Learning mats are 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.
Teaching ideas to move learners from Grey to Purple ⬇️
What you are trying to help your students achieve
In the Receives (purple) phase, students are aware of how to behave when listening to someone else and are showing an interest in what people have to say. They might ask you to repeat something or ask you to say what you mean by something. They may want to know whether what is said is right and try to keep friends with people.
Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:
Devolve responsibility for listening… by introducing the idea of listening
Talk about listening…by exploring the habit of checking that they heard what was intended
Give students opportunities to practise listening…by establishing the social conditions that make listening work
Celebrate listening… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use
1. Devolve responsibility for listening
Encourage good listening skills
Who said “Sausages”?
An activity to encourage good listening skills.
- First, try a quiet activity to help students focus on the physical sensation of intent listening.
- Ask the students to move round to sit in a circle.
- Ask them to close their eyes and clasp their hands gently on their laps.
- Tell them you are going to chime an Indian bell and that they should listen as carefully as they can and only open their eyes when they can no longer hear the sound.
- Ask them to be very, very quiet so that they do not disturb each other.
- Now move on to a simple listening game.
- Students remain sitting in their circle. They take turns to sit blindfolded in the middle.
- Point to a student in the circle who then says “sausages.” The blindfolded student has to guess whose voice it is.
- As they become more familiar with this game, they will deliberately alter their voices and it can be a lot of fun.
- Regularly remind them of the skills they are using and reward really good listening!
- After playing this game, you may be able to agree some good listening tips with the students.
2. Talk for listening
Volume control
Introduce the concept of volume and demonstrate to the students with a radio, CD player or musical instrument.
- Now relate it to speaking and listening. Model a quiet voice and whisper a rhyme or poem.
- Ask the students to use their quiet voices.
- Model a speaking voice and talk at a moderate level and ask the students to imitate you.
- Finally model a loud voice, projecting well but not shouting and again get the students to do the same.
- ‘Using’ the 3 voices ask students to respond with different actions or movements for each voice.
- Discuss with the students when they need to use the different voices and why.
In the days following this session, regularly refer to these 3 voices and ask the students to use them at different times. Use them yourself at different times and remind the students about them. Try occasionally using the “wrong” voice deliberately and discuss this with the students.
3. Give students opportunities to practise listening
Offer ways to focus on listening
a) What Can You Hear?
A short listening activity to help students to recognise that attentive listening enables them to centre themselves, focus on what is really happening and take possession of themselves as learners.
Coaching notes
b) Listening for purpose
Listening for a purpose is about sharing the reason for or purpose of listening. At this stage it’s about making the distinction between hearing and listening; saying why we are listening and what we are listening for.
With younger students this may just involve talking about what we do when we listen rather than just hear.
For older students 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.
4. Celebrate listening
Develop good listener prompts
Have the students make suggestions about good listening:
- Pay attention. Focus on the person and what is being said
- Don’t get distracted by other things around you
- Show you’re listening by saying uh-huh or nodding your head
- Keep quiet while the other person’s talking
- Wait to ask a question or give comments that show others that you care about what they’re saying.
Make these into a public display and refer to them often. This is an example from a group of 9 year olds.
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