![]() Practice – Give your students lots of guided practice in listening and speaking.It is important that teachers guide students through the note-taking process, particularly in the early stages. Note-taking – Students can start from a very young age learning to take notes.How to Encourage Effective Listening Skills Those students also experience lower levels of frustration and anxiety. Some studies have shown that students who have developed effective listening skills can more quickly acquire a new language. They become better communicators in the long run. Students that feel they are listened to and that what they say is valued have increased self-esteem. However, there are some less obvious benefits of effective listening. In turn, they will perform better academically. If students are better listeners, they will comprehend and retain more information. The impact that effective learning can have on your classroom is mostly very obvious. By becoming effective listeners and modeling those skills to our students, they are more likely to mirror those skills. We also should be listening to students talking about academics. This allows us to develop meaningful relationships with our students, which I believe is a critical component to learning. First of all, we should be listening to students talking about their lives, families, and feelings. We should be listening to them for a multitude of reasons. ![]() I think in doing this, we are doing a huge injustice to our students by not allowing them to lead and participate in conversations as we listen and respond. I know that so often we as educators feel like we have to be the ones doing the speaking in order to be effectively doing our jobs. So, the first and most critical step to implementing effective listening strategies in your classroom is to become an effective listener yourself. Effective listening also involves showing the speaker that you are listening and interested. What is Effective Listening?Įffective listening is defined as being actively absorbed in what a speaker is saying and responding in a way that lets the speaker know their message has been received. But if we are going to see improvement in this area, we must accept it and begin to utilize effective listening strategies in our classrooms. Yes, that’s a shame and no, it shouldn’t be that way. I say all of that to say this…listening can no longer be a skill set that we assume students already have when they come to school. If you grew up as I did, that would not have been acceptable behavior in your own upbringing. It may be a lack of parenting skills or it may be because the parents themselves are distracted with their own phones and devices. Also parents, for whatever reason, don’t hold children accountable for not immediately responding. As kids hyperfocus on their devices, it is easier to block out what they are being told to do. This is in no small way connected to the rise in technological devices and screen time, both in the hands of children and parents. I believe this has occurred because parents allow and even expect to have to repeat themselves many times before their child responds to them. That ability to ignore or “tune out” is easily transferred to other adults once the skill has been highly developed and practiced. ![]() Through years of teaching, parenting, and observing, I have discovered that parents have inadvertently taught their children how to ignore them. What I have found is that children have learned, and most are highly proficient, at tuning us out! With over 20 years of experience in the classroom, I have seen significant, negative developments when it comes to listening. In most cases, it is not even that they can’t comprehend what teachers are saying. It’s not that they can’t remember what their teachers have said. In most cases, the heart of the problem is not that students can’t hear their teachers. So often I hear educators, including myself, saying that one of the most significant issues teachers have to deal with today is a lack of listening skills in our students.
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