“Your teacher covered that last year” or “this semester we will cover” still rankles my professionalism as a teacher. Teaching for coverage means nominal teaching and learning. It means spending the least amount of time engaged in teaching and learning for the sake of topical accountability. Coverage teaching is like the proverbial river that is a mile wide and an inch deep – it emphasizes breadth without depth. In my naivety as a young educator I believed that if something was worth teaching it was worth learning well and that meant deeper teaching and learning. Conversely, why waste time and energy on teaching things we did not plan for children to learn well? I still believe this.
Years ago when I heard my principal or district curriculum leader talk of coverage, I assumed they were generalizing about the amount of information in any grade level of our social studies curriculum and the finite amount of instructional time in an academic year. But they weren’t. “You can’t teach everything in your curriculum with the same level of intensity” I was told. “So, cover it all.” It took me a long and troublesome time to understand this, however understanding did not mean accepting it.
There is a line between coverage and knowing and understanding.
Early on in teacher training, we are taught Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy. In the 1950s Bloom established six levels of thinking, learning, and understanding with labeling that helps us explain a rationale for teaching and learning designs. Seventy years later, I still like how Bloom helps me to add depth to the “wide river” of information we teach. The model below shows a revised taxonomy – the terms have been modified from Bloom’s original for clearer explanation of the cognitive levels.
Although there is a vertical dimension to the taxonomy, Bloom did not intend for all teaching to involve all six levels. Curriculum planners use the levels as goals for teaching and learning. Some learning, in fact most of what we learn, is meant to be at the remembering/understanding level of usage. Other learning is meant to be scaffolded into a variety of applications, or to inform careful analyses, or to evaluate options and opportunities, and to create original work. Though it looks like a ladder, a user does not use every rung to engage in higher order cognition. Instruction and learning can scaffold from understanding to analyzing, or evaluating, or creatin.
Coverage teaching is the act of “mentioning” without the explicit intention of remembering. There is a lot of mentioning in education. Synonyms for mentioning cause us to smile and acknowledge that teachers mention without teaching. When a teacher “alludes to, refers to, touches upon, hints at, speaks about briefly, broaches or introduces only,” that is mentioning. Children may or may not hear or read what a teacher mentions as an aside. Things that are mentioned are characterized as “things it is nice to know but it is okay not to know.” Like, the value of pi is abbreviated to 3.14. As an irrational number, Pi can be calculated out to an infinite number of numbers but who cares? A math teacher covers or mentions that fact but directly instructs that the usable value of pi is 3.14. Best practice does not include “mentions” in assessments of student learning, although there is a lot of bad practice in the field.
Coverage may be all the questions on Jeopardy that sound somewhat familiar but just will not come to mind.
I think of coverage as the blank space below the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy; it is the noise in the world we are not intended to remember.
Remembering and understanding is the meat and potatoes of most teaching. The information – facts, data, concepts, generalizations, and skill sets we want children to know, we teach with high intention. In the language of backward design, if we intend to test children on something, we intend to teach it well so that it will be remembered and understood.
Direct instruction is one of many teaching strategies most often used when we teach for remembering and understanding.
Children learn the alphabet and numbers, sight words and number facts early as foundational knowledge. In school we use direct instruction to drill and practice and ensure memory of these. Retention theory drives our teaching for remembering – we use immediate drill and practice/repetition to strengthen short-term memory and interval practice over time to ensure what is learned is retained and recalled in long-term memory. In a spiraled social studies curriculum, we teach US History in elementary, middle school, and high school because we want all children to know their national stories. Repetition and elaboration cause remembered learning.
Remembering is a student’s identical retelling of information or identical demonstration of what was taught. We require correct and complete retelling.
Understanding is explaining what was taught with fidelity in the student’s own words and doing the skill with fidelity in the student’s own style. Understanding is using what is remembered and making an inference about it or summarizing it in simpler language or combining several pieces of information into meaningful statement that keeps the significance and essence of what is being combined.
There also is a line between knowing and understanding what we learn and the rest of Bloom – what comes next is the so what of education.
Separating the noise of information from the teaching of remembering and understanding, gets us to the “so what” levels of Bloom where what was learned is applied, analyzed, evaluated, and built upon creatively. These four Bloom levels give us the rationale for why teaching for remembering and understanding are such a large part of our school calendar. Without foundational memory about stars, planets, moons, suns, constellations, galaxies, and a universe(s), nothing we see in the sky above us would make sense. Space would just be space. Lifesaving surgery would be butchery. Agriculture and manufacturing would just be guessing work.
Other teaching strategies become available when students have a knowledge and understanding of foundational information and skills. I use the C3 Framework for social studies as an example of instructing above the remembering and understanding line. C3 (College, Career, Civic Life) uses an inquiry process for students to investigate, expand and integrate their knowledge of civics, economics, geography, history, and the behavioral sciences.
“The C3 Framework, like the Common Core Standards, emphasizes the acquisition and application of knowledge to prepare students for college, career, and civic life. It intentionally envisions social studies instruction as an inquiry arc of interlocking and mutually reinforcing elements that speak to the intersection of ideas and learners.” C3 uses “questions to spark curiosity, guide instruction, deepen investigations, acquire rigorous content, and apply knowledge and ideas in real world settings…”
Parallel to C3, curricula in every school subject, from art to woodworking, builds upon information and skills students learn at the remembering and understanding levels of instruction. The front of a refrigerator in most student homes is covered with student drawings and finger paintings. Over time, shelves and walls display how student application of basic information and skills blossoms into more intricate and sophisticated art. Student art displayed in local galleries, libraries, and art shows illustrates how student artists apply of fundamental concepts and skills, analyze and interpret subjects, and create new and original art.
Tech ed students manufacture, ag students grow and cultivate, computer science students program and engage in robotics, ELA writers craft poems and stories, and marketing ed students create businesses, apply accounting, create and manage product, lead and supervise personnel in the pursuit of economic growth. Once students know and understand, they can pursue their personal interests for a lifetime.
Know and be the difference.
There is so much in a teacher’s annual curriculum and so little time that it is easy to fall into the coverage mode of teaching. But why? In today’s world, coverage learning is what any child can achieve using Google or AI.
Two centuries ago, teachers were the source of information and applied learning. A century ago, students could read books for information; it was teacher directed and interpreted learning that moved children to young adults ready for college or work. Today, information sources abound, so much so that it hard to know information from noise. Today it takes a teacher to forge information into memory and understanding. And it takes a teacher to guide, monitor, and mentor how students illustrate and expand their learning. Well-conceived and instructed learning remains a springboard for life’s successes.
There is no time or place today for coverage teaching.
“Are you hearing me?”. Right question. Humans begin hearing sounds, including human voices, in the womb. Unless impaired, hearing, like seeing, is an innate characteristic of humans. We are made to hear the noise that surrounds us every day.
“Are you listening to me?”. Another right question. Listening is an acquired skill that the person you are speaking to may not have mastered. Given the noise a person hears in their immediacy, it is an assumption that you are being listened to. There is a huge difference between hearing and listening.
“Are you actively listening to me?”. A better question. But, “maybe not” is a very common answer.
As educators, the issue we face is how to teach hearers to become listeners and listeners to become active listeners. If we believe in natural learning, we can allow a hearing child to wander through life in the belief that experience creates listening skills. The skills of listening are in her and just need time and place to become effective everyday tools. That may happen, but many adults today demonstrate untrained listening characteristics. They hear. They recognize the source or speaker. They may acknowledge the topic of the speaker. Then, they fade into being untrained listeners. Their focus wanders, they insert own ideas, they start to create a rebuttal before the speaker has finished, and their thinking pursues unrelated tangents. Some of the unschooled just shut down when they are asked to listen because they don’t know how.
Listening is an acquired skill we need to teach to children.
What is listening?
“Listening begins by hearing a speaker producing the sound to be listened to. Hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act. People are always hearing, most of the time subconsciously. Listening is done by choice. It is the interpretative action taken by someone in order to understand, and potentially make sense of, something one hears”.
Listening and seeing are the primary ways people gather information. This is one of the reasons Helen Keller’s stories is so meaningful. She was deaf and blind. She did not hear or see and was unable to learn from these two essential senses. With instruction, her brain learned to associate meaning through touch and smell and associate Braille dots with letters and words. She truly was taught to “listen” to non-sounds. Almost all of us take our hearing and seeing for granted. However, without learning how to listen and to discern listening from hearing, we also are disabled in our ability to learn from our sense of hearing.
There are other good reasons to become good listeners.
Good listeners are more likable. Individuals with strong listening skills are present in the conversation. People who listen with focus are often perceived as more likable.
Good listeners build stronger relationships. Communication is not a one-way street. Good listeners show interest, ask open-ended questions, and acknowledge what’s being said. This helps reduce misunderstandings and builds stronger relationships.
Good listeners have a clearer understanding of the topics being discussed. Individuals with refined listening skills seek to fully understand a speaker’s message. They pay attention to both verbal and nonverbal cues and ask for clarification when needed.
Parents are a child’s first teachers of listening skills. With their first “Say ‘Mama/Dada”, parents teach an infant to associate sounds and words with a desired meaning. A parent says a word and coos to give it meaning, or holds up a toy and names it, or points to food on a spoon and names it. They speak “baby talk” or “parentese” to encourage their baby to make a desired association. Most parents do not have training in this; they are not taught how to teach their child to listen. They do what they remember being done for them, or what family members tell them to do. Others talk with their young parent peers. In general, infants from birth to pre-school or instructional daycare are subjected to several years of popular wisdom-informed parenting.
The Science of Early Learning provides 22 techniques for parents to try in their efforts to move their baby from hearers of sounds to a baby who is building skills as a listener. A search of the literature, including the tenth edition of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, provides a plethora of resources for parents to teach their children to be listeners.
By age 4, children reflect many of their parents’ listening characteristics. This comes as conflicting news for many parents, because in their multiple family roles they are not always aware that an infant is listening to their every word. Children hear us even when we do not want to be heard. An infant’s auditory vocabulary is influenced by and mirrors the words, vocabulary, sentence structures, and dialects their parents or their older siblings use. Babies soak up almost everything they see and hear a parent do because they have no filtering mechanisms.
When infants do not begin to micmic parents and siblings, there is worry that hearing may be impaired.
That is why schools are mandated through Child Find activities to use auditory testing to verify a child’s hearing
In Wisconsin, schools, daycares, pre-schools, and local physicians partner to inform young parents about the Child Find activities of local elementary schools. One of the screenings typical of a Child Find appointment is a hearing assessment. Teachers work with parents in the primary school when either believes that a student/child has difficulty hearing. Testing and a diagnosis can lead to further testing and perhaps to special education service and accommodations.
Who at school teaches children to be listeners? Incidentally, we may think school bus drivers are at the frontline of teaching children to listen because they are the first adult to greet a child each school day. Be clear, drivers want children to listen but they do not teach listening skills. A drivers’ first priority is bus driving and student safety, and she/he does not typically speak instructionally but in an directing voice.
Schools are mandated to teach children to listen and do so indirectly and directly. One of a 4K-K teacher’s first action each morning is gaining student attention, channeling them from all the noise surrounding them as they get out of a family car or school bus, enter the school, put their things on hallway hooks or in cubbies or lockers, and enter their classroom. The sounds of their classmates surround them. Children hear their teacher say, “Sit down. Eyes on me. Give me your ears”. And so, school listening instruction begins.
Veteran kindergarten teachers look like magicians to parents of 4-year-olds gathered for Kindergarten round ups and orientations. They efficiently quiet squirming kids and boisterous children as easily as they herd cats. For most veterans, the use of curated commands, signals, words, voice, body language, and attitude over time work to change behaviors and make children more amenable listeners. Effective teaching at all levels incorporates myriads of indirect communications that move a hearing child to a listening student.
The mandate for direct instruction derives from our state’s adapting the Common Core ELA standards into Wisconsin’s ELA standards. All children are to be instructed in listening, as well as reading, writing, and speaking. The Wisconsin DPI standards place listening and speaking in the context of effective communications. Schools are mandated to instruct children in how to listen and in how to speak that causes them to be active and “productive communicators” in a wide variety of school and life circumstances.
These standards are directed toward developing students’ abilities to productively participate in communicative exchanges. Productive participation means that students are able to communicate in large group, small group, and one-on-one exchanges with varied audiences, for varied purposes, and in varied situations; can respond to and develop what others have said; can contribute accurate, relevant information; and can analyze and synthesize a multitude of ideas in various domains. Students must have ample opportunities to take part in a variety of conversations and communicative exchanges in order to practice and apply these standards. Some standards repeat from grade-level to grade-level in recognition of the fact that students’ understandings develop and deepen over time. The ultimate goal of these standards is that students are able to understand and make flexible choices in their use of language in order to meet their communicative goals with varied audiences, for varied purposes, and in varied situations.”
Each phrase in the above introduction points to a facet of effective communication and the last sentence poses the capstone – to meet communicative goals with varied audiences, for varied purposes, and in varied situations. Additionally, the fluid use of the word “varied” causes almost all listening skills instruction to be embedded in subject, content, or skills instruction. The context is listening within the instruction of reading or math or art or PE. Seldom do teachers provide naked listening skill instruction devoid of a context for listening to something to be learned.
Elementary teachers focus early instruction of listening skills, so children learn to listen in these multiple school situations:
Audience – one-to-one communications, small group, large group.
Purpose – listening for directions, information, entertainment, conversation.
Responding based upon purpose – repeat what is heard, interpret what is heard, personalize what is heard,
When choices are available, be able to make a choice based upon what has been heard.extend
Teachers prepare and move children from one learning activity to another many times during a school day. Routines are normalized and expectations for student listening are essential. Teachers use routine signals to alert children to listen. They may flick the classroom lights on and off, use a chime, or a buzzer. The concept is that the signal alerts children to listen. Once alerted to listen, a teacher focuses students to listen for “who is to do what, how, when, and why”. Twenty or thirty minutes later, another signal is used, students are alerted to listen, and the class moves into another activity.
Many listening skills are universal for school children. Given the age of elementary learners, a great deal of instructional time is committed to group expectations and how an individual student in a group or classroom listens. One college’s teacher prep program stresses the “Three As of listening – attitude, attention, adjustment.” Teachers must shape children’s behavior first to an attitude of community. A recognition that all classmates matter is a huge first step for a 4K-K child. Once teachers have each child moving from “me” to “we”, the teacher creates, uses and reinforces strategies for gaining student visual and auditory attention. We tend to pay attention to what we are looking at and that attention helps us to block out the noise so we can focus on the sounds coming from the person being seen. In evolving from hearing to focused listening a child is ready to adjust to what is being said, asked, or directed.
Put into context, the routine above is used to prepare children for whole group activities, like recess or lunch. Listening routines also are used to prepare students for reading group instruction, or individual work time at interest centers in the classroom.
Hearing to listen is a first step. Listening for a purpose is a second. Listening as preparation for doing something based upon what one listens to is a new step. Studies indicate we remember only between 25-50% of what we hear – the rest is abandoned as noise. After ten minutes of listening, most people begin to drift and can remember less that half of their initial level of remembering. Unfocused listening results in an awareness of less than 25% of what we hear.
Based upon these studies, teachers learn to “chunk” communications they want children to hear, listen to, remember, and be able to respond to or act upon. To do this, there are several time-tested cues for getting a child to listen and follow directions. The institutional experiences of Boys Town tell us to do this.
So far, we have addressed the importance of listening, the mandate to teach children to listen, and the general routines and frameworks for listening. The next level, teaching children to be active listeners, is where the effective communications expectations of the mandates make an educational difference.
Accuracy. For decades teachers have heard and used the phrase “checking for understanding”. Ask children to repeat back to you what they listened to you say. An accurate repeat conveys congruence – the child heard and listened to what you said. Asking multiple children to repeat what they listened to you say creates an accountability for listening.
Don’t be surprised when a child’s repeating of what they heard you say is nothing like what you said. They “heard”, they did not “listen”. Listening is a learned skill. Patience and persistence are called for. Simply tell your information a second time and again check for understanding. And perhaps a third and fourth time.
Because listening is an acquired skill and “acquiring” requires time to learn and time is a valuable instructional commodity, teachers sadly diminish checking for understanding over time. Teaching accuracy in listening takes time and time wasted due to misunderstanding is far greater that the time to check for initial understanding.
Detail. Active listening requires an ear for details, and we can teach children to pay attention to details. The first step is to write down the details as they are verbally given. Check for understanding on the details. A second step is to create “responsibility” for details. One student listens for the “who”, another for the “what”, another for the “how”, another for the “to what degree” and another for the “when”. Check for understanding. Rotate responsibilities as some details are given at the end of the directions and everyone must listen to the entire direction.
I observe high quality teachers checking for understanding and for the details of listening in junior and senior high school classrooms. Not only is what the mandate tells us to do, it is best practice.
Nuance. Many of the things we listen to are loaded with clues as to the feelings and values and dispositions of the speaker. Accuracy and details may be further understood by the way they are delivered. Teachers are not robotics delivering information in monotoned voices. They imbue what they tell children with the excitement and suspense of new learning. Children need to understand nuance and identify when it supplies extra meaning to their listening. Have children listen specifically for descriptor words and phrases; listen to the adjectives and adverbs and prepositions. Ask listeners to interpret the socio-emotional flavor of what they listened to.
Clarification and response. Assign listening students to craft a clarifying question after their listening. Is there a detail that is not clear enough? Is there a possible early response a listener wants to try out while still in a checking for understanding phase? Consider all the time teachers spend answering student questions after the work has begun. When children ask clarifying questions at the time of the directions they demonstrate and reinforce their skills as active listeners.
Synergy. Active listening demonstrates a respect and rapport between teacher and students. When the speaker and listeners are actively engaged, speakers are encouraged to be more descriptive of details and nuance. Respect for the speaker
In order to propel student learning, communications must become two-way, respectful, challenging, and nuanced. It may require specific vocabulary and exacting terms. As communication becomes more focused in specific outcomes, the need for listening and responding skills become even greater.
How to teach children to be active listeners?
Generalized, active listening is hearing, paying attention, listening, and an ability to respond to what is listened to. These statements cover the waterfront of how children and teachers engage in school communications, especially as children get older. It takes loads of concentration, focused attention, and personal commitment to be an active listener. To be active, a listener has to set aside all of the bad habits of hearing and initial listening and shift into being a committed listener. Active listening skills come from with in the listener.
Pay attention. When paying attention, there is about a one second lag between the speaker speaking and the listener’s brain hearing.
Show that you are listening. When a speaker perceives you as a listener, the speaker’s brain recognizes and begins to lock into this interpersonal communication. Take notes.
Provide feedback. Repeat key points to demonstrate listening.
Defer judgment.
Respond appropriately. Ask valid and respectful questions, summarize key points, suggest what you want to know or do next.
Elevating active listening to upper-level listening.
Knowing that active listening is within the listener yet is cued by teacher communication, we can elevate active listening by moving our teaching interactions from the lower three levels – remembering, understanding, and applying – to higher levels of thinking – analyzing, evaluating, and creating. The sociometrics of a classroom conversation change drastically when we move from asking students for the recall or interpretation of knowledge to the comparing and contrasting ideas, evaluating an ideas significance, or generating new solutions. Instead of teacher-student interactions, conversations become student-student exchanges. Teachers use wait time to assure students have time to consider their arguments while using body language to assure a student who is eager to contribute will be able to do so. Active listening leads to intellectual excitement – the teaching moments teachers cling to in their memories of classroom work.
Once again we are called to use what we know to be true of good teaching and learning yet find difficult to do in the fast pacing of school life.
We know these things.
Listening is a core skill essential for students at all levels of their education.
Listening is a learned behavior that we must teach at all grade levels and in all subjects.
Listening is more than hearing if it is to be educational.
Listening takes time and commitment to the behaviors of attention, attitude, and adjustment that allow us to receive, understand, and act upon what we listen to.
Active listening leads to higher levels of intellectual and academic productivity.
And we too often do these things.
Pace our teaching based on the first child who appears to have heard us.
Do not check for accuracy, detail, or nuance with enough children to assure that good listening occurred.
Let the clock determine what comes next in a lesson rather than what we listen to as student readiness for next instruction.
Students are more likely to mirror how we listen and use listening skills than they do our instruction in reading, writing, and speaking. You know this is true. Just listen to yourself.
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