Tracking the Speaker Versus Active Listening

• 100% of students’ hands in the air
• 100% of kids tracking the speaker
• 100% of the time

In classrooms where students are trained to “track the speaker,” we often hear teachers reminding students that  “All eyes should be on the speaker.” Tracking the speaker is a common expectation in urban classrooms, where we are concerned that a lack of student engagement results in low achievement.

No one would disagree that increasing student engagement is important to increasing learning outcomes in American classrooms. We all want 100% of our students to be engaged in their learning and paying attention to what is going on around them in class.

But we question that tracking the speaker automatically translates into increased engagement and the kind of active listening that is central to inquiry-based learning.

In a high-quality classroom discussion, students’ answers build off of other students’ responses, and there is a fluidity to the growth of collective meaning-making that is only possible when students are actively listening and truly tuned in to what their classmates are saying.

Sometimes, however, when a student’s hand goes up, his thinking gets locked in to the answer that he originally raised his hand to convey. If a student’s thinking gets locked in at that place where his hand went up, then that answer may be “out of sync” with where the discussion is in the present moment…or at the moment when the teacher finally calls on him. How many of you who are teachers have called on a student whose hand is in the air and gotten a response that sounds like, “Umm, I forgot what I was going to say,” or gotten a deer-in-the-headlights stare?

It is also true that students learn how to fake engagement very quickly. Just because a student is looking at the speaker, it doesn’t mean that she is actually thinking about what her classmate is saying. The simple test of a teacher asking a listening student, “Can you put that into your own words,” will reveal the answer.

It is our job as educators to make sure our students are actively listening and participating in the cognitive work of their classrooms. Strong inquiry-based instruction promotes students’ active listening, while tracking the speaker, though a good first step, may create only the appearance of it.

The Problem with Cognitive Closure

In general, teachers want to make sure that their students are learning and thinking well, and we tend to get excited when students demonstrate their learning by answering questions correctly. But what happens when teachers reward students by validating their answers? Unfortunately, when we reward a student’s valid answer, that answer becomes the answer, and the thinking in the classroom tends to stop at that point.

Picture yourself in a 9th grade classroom. The students are studying imperialism, reading George Orwell’s short essay, “Shooting an Elephant.” Desks are arranged in a large circle with students facing one another. The teacher is seated in the circle and wants to facilitate a robust class discussion about Orwell’s motivation for shooting the elephant and the nature of imperialism.

The teacher asks the class, “Why does Orwell shoot the elephant?”

After several seconds of contemplation, a student raises her hand and says, “I think Orwell shoots the elephant because he wants to save face in front of the locals.”

The teacher responds, “Very good,” validating the student’s response.

The student feels that she has done enough “work” in this class discussion. She has, after all, offered a correct answer, so she checks out of the discussion, relaxing into the background of the classroom environment. Other students are unwilling to raise additional answers, as the teacher has already validated what they perceive as the right answer rather than a potential correct answer.

In answering and validating the question, the thinking stops, and a dynamic opportunity has been wasted.

The problem with cognitive closure, or closing down the process of thinking-through what something may mean, is that students become intellectually passive, rather than developing a persistent and tenacious stance toward problem-solving. Cognitive closure is instant gratification. Thinking through multiple potentially correct answers requires a stick-with-it mentality that is central to developing critical thinking in a classroom.

Promoting Critical Thinking Over Being “Right”

In a recent article for Education Week, columnist Alina Tugend explores “Why Wrong is Not Always Bad,” and argues that we “need to teach kids how to fail.”

Of course, in education now we are more likely to talk about why failure is not an option rather than about teaching students to fail, but what I would actually say this article articulates is that we are failing to teach students something important if we are teaching them to focus on a single right answer at the expense of learning to think and reason their way through complex ideas.

She writes “[W]hen we tell kids that learning is all about the results, we teach them that mistakes are something to be feared and voided. We stifle their interest in experimenting because experimenting means you’re going to screw up and blunder and fail. And that’s too big a risk.”

It’s true…wrong is not always bad, and we need to teach students persistence when they are not immediately correct. We also need to teach them to go deeper than their immediate answer, even if that answer is technically “correct.”