Educators Recommend Using Our HEAR Strategy During the Holiday Season

In the weeks leading up to the holidays, teachers tell us that it is sometimes difficult to help students stay focused on learning. Teachers around the world use our HEAR strategy to assist students to learn how to internalize the skill of active listening in order to understand what others are saying.

Susan Marie Poulette, CCC-SLP, a speech and language pathologist and educator, references our article in her piece titled “Classroom Listening Before the Holidays—Herding Cats?”

Training the Brain to Listen: A Practical Strategy for Student Learning and Classroom Management

Editor’s Note: This popular blog post, co-authored by Marcus Conyers, originally appeared on Edutopia. We received a tremendous response to the post and are republishing it here so that new readers can benefit from the information and strategies provided.

During the school year, students are expected to listen to and absorb vast amounts of content. But how much time has been devoted to equipping students with ways to disconnect from their own internal dialogue (self-talk) and to focus their attention fully on academic content that is being presented? Listening is hard work even for adults. When students are unable to listen effectively, classroom management issues arise.

Explicit instruction on cognitive strategies that can help students learn how to learn may have a positive impact on both academic performance and classroom management by emphasizing that students are in charge of their own behavior and learning. Teachers we've worked with find that classroom management issues decrease over time as students begin to master thinking skills that help them become more self-directed learners.

Engage the Senses for a Total Learning Experience

We experience the world through our senses—through sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile impressions. The more fully we engage our senses, the more we experience and the more we learn.

We recommend that teachers use multiple sensory learning activities whenever possible to help students better understand and integrate the use of cognitive assets in their studies and in their lives. Encourage students to create graphics to illustrate these cognitive assets by drawing the concepts on which they are based and creating posters.

Our use of the brain car graphic, which underscores the importance of driving our own learning, is a popular example of how graphics can make a lesson memorable. Similarly, using a model of a brain can help effectively teach the concept of metacognition.

Listen Up with the HEAR Strategy

Aaron Rohde, in his hard hat, is read
to tackle the work associated with HEARing.

As schools get under way across the nation, we thought it would be a perfect time to talk about the importance of listening, a topic that we addressed in an Edutopia blog post but certainly is worth repeating here.

Getting students to listen is a more than a common classroom challenge. The Common Core State Standards for Language Arts recognize the importance of listening as an ability that students must master to become college and career ready: “Students must learn to work together, express and listen carefully to ideas, integrate information from oral, visual, quantitative, and media sources, evaluate what they hear, use media and visual displays strategically to help achieve communicative purposes, and adapt speech to context and task.”

As Aaron Rohde, a teacher at Trinity Lutheran School in Reed City, Michigan, and a graduate of our program, says, “Being a ‘listening genius’ will be beneficial in all areas of life—in school, in personal relationships, and in professional work situations.”