Listening is an essential language skill and academic habit – it is estimated that people expend 45 percent of their energy time to call Listening vs Speaking is only 30 percent more – however, students often get little clear instruction on how to pay attention to each other.
As schools work to help students restore academic habits disrupted during the pandemic, experts have called for more Practice intentional listening and other communication skills. New one Stady He suggests quick ways to teach students how to listen to their peers by building deeper academic discussions and challenging stereotypes about race and gender in classes like math.
Karen Brown, an education researcher at the University of Michigan, recorded and analyzed how fifth-grade math teachers in Midwestern classrooms led peer discussions in ways that encouraged equitable participation. Popular approaches focus on hearing from peers, including:
- Have one student answer a problem and then have another student explain a classmate’s answer.
- Solicit several different answers to a question, and then ask students to think about the reasons behind the answer they disagree with.
- Create exit tickets or homework assignments in which students think about how a classmate’s idea might change their thinking.
By giving students the opportunity to practice using questions, [the teacher] Brown said in a discussion at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting last week, where she presented her findings. “Instead of just listening to be this general thing that the teacher asks the students to do, he gives them specific steps that he would like them to take.”
Brown noted that creating a framework for peer listening may also help reduce stereotypes in classes like math. In general, previous studies have found training in listening decrease Racism and prejudice. But teachers may also be able to reduce the threat of stereotype—where a student fears realizing a negative stereotype about the abilities of their gender or ethnic group—by highlighting and directing their insights to lead class discussions.
“Teachers can get students to reflect on what they learned from classmates of color, which can cut through the racial hierarchy of mathematical ability,” she said.