ID3 GTT2 2006-07-02 Those who have ears COM eng Former Queensland teacher Jennifer Riggs looks at an extensive study by the Australian Council for Education Research which identifies serious problems with auditory processing in a high proportion of children. ULT ) eng
Robyn Williams: Did you, perchance, hear the Science Show four weeks ago in which Harelene Hayne, Professor of Psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, talked about the memories of children. It seems, she said, that kids get confused if you ask the wrong questions. They can go along with all sorts of mad stories a grown-up is telling them, if the adult is forceful enough. Ask the right questions, and you get a completely different response. You can enable the child, even a very young one, to dig deep at distant memories and make lots of sense in the process.
Well Professor Hayne's approach also applies to teaching. How many of us remember the fast-talking, flash teacher, who lost us in the first few minutes, and we could never actually recover? Jennifer Riggs, who used to teach in Brisbane, tells some poignant tales.
Jennifer Riggs: The Sunday School teacher was delighted to see that at least one of her class was drinking in her words as she told the story of Lot's wife, who looked behind her and was turned into a pillar of salt. He was smiling and nodding his head and could hardly wait for her to finish before his hand shot up as he said excitedly, 'I know just what you mean. My Mummy looked behind her and she turned into the gatepost!'
Another small boy, who had obviously been listening to his teacher, went home and told his mother the class had been learning all about 'stranger danger'. 'Teacher said we mustn't ever talk to strangers!' 'Quite right', said the mother, smiling at her little son. 'And she said we must never take lollies from strangers ... accept a lift from strangers ...' and so went the litany, with the mother agreeing at every point, delighted that her child had listened so well and that the teacher had got the message across so thoroughly. Finally, the little boy looked up at his mother and asked, 'Mummy, do we know any strangers?'
Yet another story that has the ring of truth to it, tells of a young boy who came home complaining bitterly that the teacher had moved him and had called him a disgusting elephant. Mother thought this was bit rich and when she dropped him off the next morning she made a point of having a word with the teacher. She said as mildly as she could that she didn't appreciate her son being called names. '... I know he can be annoying at times, but really ...' The teacher looked nonplussed, genuinely puzzled. 'So what am I supposed to have said?' she asked. The mother told her, again trying her best not to sound too angry. 'Oh', said the teacher, 'I said I would have to move him because he was a disruptive element'.
Three sincere, lucid messages, delivered by experienced communicators; all misunderstood, though quite clearly heard.
Why? Stories like this stop being amusing when one realises the implications for the children concerned. There is nothing wrong with these children's ears, and absolutely nothing wrong with their intelligence, in fact many are a lot brighter than your average bear. But ...
An extensive study by the Australian Council for Educational Research identifies serious problems with auditory processing in a high proportion of children. They are bamboozled by rapid-fire teacher talk. They recommend instead a back-to-basics teaching style, quieter, slower, more focused.
It is not chance that all these stories were about boys; psychologist John Edwards warns that boys in particular are treading water in the sea of blah that is the average classroom.
To quote Patricia Kuhl, the world's leading authority on speech development: 'There are children who are perfectly intelligent but who still have a hard time with language. We don't know exactly what causes these language disorders, but we do know that the disorders run in families ...'
Linda Silverman, educator par excellence and champion of 'The Upside Down Brilliance of the Visual Spatial Learner', points out that 'acute hearing may actually interfere with the development of listening skills ...' because there are too many distractions in the peripheral range. Picture the analogy of trying to read the newspaper under strobe lighting.
She now has the outcome of an extensive study which shows that fully a third of us are strongly visual-spatial learners, or not auditory. Only a quarter of us do learn best by listening. Of the remainder, more than half are somewhat visual-spatial in their processing. What this adds up to is that the prevailing teaching methods, still predominantly chalk and talk, do not suit two-thirds of the class. We need a rethink.
Winston Churchill, a late bloomer on account of his own particular form of language difficulties, which rendered him a school failure, was so sensitive to noise and so distractible that he dictated his speeches at dead of night because even the jangling of cow bells would destroy his train of thought. 'But whistling was the worst', he said.
A boy who had this trouble happened to be a keen science fiction reader and was able to develop for himself an auditory force-field shield to reduce the effect, if not completely nullify extraneous sounds.
Einstein, whose mother sought professional help because his speech was still undeveloped by the age of three, was repeating his words to himself under his breath until he was seven or more. His disability with auditory learning added up to an inability to learn by rote, even more popular then than now, and that added up to his well-known school failure.
When we hear complaints like: 'The teacher talks too fast' or '... talks funny', or '... shouts' or '... the others make too much noise' it tends to mean the child is not an auditory learner and cannot learn through being talked at, may prefer discussion, but will learn much better by seeing and doing.
A puzzling characteristic of some of these children, who can be such inefficient listeners, is that they often have a fine flow of speech and superior vocabulary, can be great raconteurs and even are often verbally witty. Don't ask me how.
Renowned poet W.B. Yeats is a case in point, a wonderful feeling for language, but his work could only see the light of day after extensive editing and correction. When he applied for a university chair, he even misspelled the word 'professor'. He didn't get the post, which may be lucky for us readers.
Edison is only one of the many scientists and mathematicians with documented difficulties, so much so that neurologist Norman Geschwind observes that 'certain changes on the left side of the brain lead to superiority of other regions ... a pathology of superiority'. So it's not all bad.
Unquestionably the fundamentals of learning are the five senses. How many of them do we use in teaching? Considering that these are the perceptions that arouse natural curiosity and stimulate our brains into action, we should be a little more inclusive of the whole range. How could we do this?
Maybe it could be argued that the so-called sixth sense is not paranormal at all, but a powerful conglomeration of the other five acting in synergy. Perceptions processed at lightning speed might well produce that all-round awareness that seems to come from nowhere. In reality it is coming from everywhere. Could we devise a Gestalt of really rich tasks that go way beyond a sequence of component ingredients?
It's certainly true that many bright children are hungry for the inclusion of a wider and deeper range of input, and thence of process and output. As well as the full span of senses, we need also to embed all of the Multiple Intelligences, Learning Styles, processing modalities and output options ... the list goes on ... We need also to be aware of and cater for the whole spectrum of personality types.
Problem: how?
There are tricks of the trade, of course, and the biggest and best is to harness the inventiveness and originality of students.
This is the sort of challenge children cherish. The fresh green hat of creativity is much more fun than the grunge grey of regurgitation.
From earliest days the basic and instinctive challenges of thinkers are sensory and problematical exploration: what does it feel like, look like, smell like, taste like, sound like? And supposing ...? What if ...? How could ..." So what ... How does this fit in with what I know already? What are the implications...? What next? These are the habits of mind that fix experiences into memory, that underlie skills, that perform the function of the 'enter' button. Without such processing our overload sensory screening comes into operation and messages simply wash over us. Ever seen that glazed 'out to lunch' look on a little face? Time to switch channels.
We can set things up for such challenging intellectual explorations (Add-in, rather than Add-on) by embedding complex reasoning, holistic overviews, integrative (or transdisciplinary) learning experiences and the manna of higher order thinking skills. In computer terms, we might say QIQO - Quality In, Quality Out.
Even those of us who are beginning to understand this paradox may find it hard to advocate for our children with auditory processing problems because we feel on the defensive when they are seen as behaviour problems - oppositional they call it these days. Can the adult world, parents or teachers, have sympathy for a child who talks non-stop but won't, or can't, listen? No one relishes the idea of being the parent from hell who tries to teach the teacher, yet our first duty is to our own children.
What can we do about it?
All parents with more than one child know about individual differences, every teacher learns about individual differences in Ed. 101. By now the pop-neurology of left-brain right-brain has filtered through; many of us do know that some children learn better hands-on. We know, at least in theory, that people need to learn with a rich combination of seeing, hearing, and touching. When we take this a step further and use the language of all three styles in everything we say, we can be very much more confident that our messages will be understood by all - everyone can see the point, catch the meaning, hear the message loud and clear.
Robyn Williams: Jennifer Riggs, implying that teachers these days need to be psychologists, communicators par excellence, neurophysiologists, time and motion experts and also know the curriculum inside out. If she's right, and I'm sure she is, maybe they should have their salaries doubled.
Next week we meet Mr Young of Young's modulus. Why isn't he better known? He was once called the English Leonardo.
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