#Active listening examples students how to

5. Cut distractionsĭistractions can take many forms: mobile phones, laptops, overdue assignments for other classes. Instead, craft intentional questions that ask for deep thinking, and then direct those questions to particular students, and engage deeply with their answers.

Moreover, it doesn’t model active listening and engagement. But if the presenter (that’s you) is seeking one specific answer and rejects all other offers, that’s not authentic communication. Similarly, it’s tempting to pose “Guess what’s in my head?” questions these are open-ended with a lot of possible answers. That means that if a student makes a comment or asks a question, we owe it to them to listen carefully and actively, and to clarify if we’re not sure what they’re asking. In teaching – as in life – it’s best to practise what we preach. It is up to us as experts to direct attention to the most powerful and important ideas and transition novices towards expertise. Our students are novices in the topic, and without some clear guidance from us they may well focus on peripheral details and miss the essential points. We’re usually experts in our subject area when we teach, and part of expertise is deep knowledge. This can be as simple as offering an overview on an early presentation slide or a whiteboard or pausing to say explicitly: ‘This is a key idea because it explains X”. Just as signposting at the beginning of a presentation is important, so too is drawing attention to the key concepts, the Big Ideas, along the way. But it doesn’t harm anyone, and it really helps some students to have an outline of the territory before they march into it. Different kinds of thinkers will respond differently to this approach – “ sequential thinkers”, for example, are happy to receive one piece of knowledge at a time, while “global thinkers” need to see the big picture to make sense of something.

Setting out the topic clearly at the beginning and then outlining the steps to get there might seem like giving spoilers, but it can help to orient students towards the most important and relevant information and therefore where to focus their attention. While a lecture or talk should have a story, it shouldn’t resemble a mystery novel where we don’t find out “whodunnit” until the end. This keeps students engaged and intrigued to find out where the story is going. Teaching the science around atoms does often follow the historical sequence, but another approach is to begin with the concept that “everything is made of atoms”, then to complicate and elaborate this by considering the diversity of matter and materials and the different kinds of atoms that make them, and finally to introduce the periodic table that organises and explains our thinking about atoms. Rather, I mean a story in the sense that your presentation has a beginning that sets up expectations, a middle that complicates them and an end that resolves them. I don’t mean a fictional story or even one from history (although I do tend to talk about Newton’s apple and Archimedes’ bath in my science teaching). So, how can lecturers actively foster these actions in their students? 1. Tell a story Don’t lose sight of learning outcomes in pursuit of digital innovation, counsels task force.

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#Active listening examples students how to

It occurs when students are keenly paying attention, anticipating what is coming next, challenging the ideas presented, thinking through how these ideas fit with their existing knowledge and perspective, and reflecting on how to apply the new learning in their work and life. Much more difficult to diagnose is a passive listening approach in which our words flow into their short-term memory and out of their heads again almost immediately.Īctive listening leads to deeper understanding and better knowledge retention. It’s easy to tell when students are physically absent, and not much harder to tell when they’re not listening at all.