Teaching on Purpose #2
Putting decision making at the heart of teaching
At Chiltern Learning Trust, we have six core purposes that capture everything teachers do:
Securing, maintaining and regaining attention
Communicating meaning
Driving student thinking
Providing, scaffolding and consolidating practice
Utilising memory
Checking for understanding
Each week, I interview one of our teachers on the ‘Teaching on purpose’ podcast about a technique they commonly use to serve one of our six core purposes and I write about it here…
This week’s purpose: Securing, maintaining and regaining attention
This week’s technique: 3,2,1 Active listening
3,2,1 Active listening involves a teacher taking up an appropriate position in the classroom where they can see all students and also be seen by all. They count down 3…2…1 and narrate their expectation and positive behaviours in between each number. The countdown finishes with the expectation that all students are paying attention as per the teacher’s expectations. For example…
3, all pens down… I have everyone on the front row, I have everyone in the room now…. 2, eyes on me… I have everyone right away, thank you…1, silence, just waiting for one… I have everyone.
This week, I spoke to Gavin Ward, Assistant Headteacher at Kempston Academy about how he uses this technique.
When might 3,2,1 Active listening be used in a routine way?
When students are doing group work, they are often moving between writing and talking, either individually or in their groups. The noise in the room is likely to be reasonably high and there are multiple points of potential attention for students – other students and the task to name just two. In this situation, 3,2,1 Active listening might be a useful technique to use to bring the whole class back to one central point of attention – the teacher.
In between each number, the teacher might name one or two individuals or groups who have followed the instruction quickly. For example,
‘3… pens down… thank you Yemi, your pen was down right away. Julie, yours too, thank you.’
This narration is helpful when you are bringing students back from a group task because it provides an extra incentive to refocus attention quickly.
This execution of 3,2,1 Active listening suits the demands of the context because it serves the purpose of regaining attention in that context. When students have been shifting their attention between a task, their own thinking and the conversation of their group, it is likely to take a little longer to bring everyone’s attention back to that central point. Narrating the positive in between each number acts as a positive extra reminder of what the teacher’s expectation is.
When might 3,2,1 Active listening be adapted?
When the teacher wants to bring student attention back to them while students are working on a silent independent task, it might be more appropriate to shorten the countdown and remove the scaffolding of naming the individual behaviours attached to each number. For example,
‘3,2,1, pens down and back to me, thank you’.
In this example, the teacher would still deliberately scan the room to check that students were not just continuing with their independent work. However, students are being asked to move their attention from their work to the teacher – from one point to another. This is less cognitively demanding that in the group work example and so the scaffolding may not be required.
Of course, there may be a need to insert narration in between each number depending on a range of contexts. For example, if the teacher wants to scaffold students finishing the sentence they are on. This is another contextual adaption because in this instance, the amount of time the teacher gives students to comply with the instruction would likely be longer than if the instruction was ‘3… eyes on me’.
When might 3,2,1 Active listening not be used?
When students are working on an independent task, there are times when one or two students are distracted. In this situation, the teacher can’t ignore the inattentive behaviour because inevitably, this behaviour starts to bleed across the class. But, they probably wouldn’t want to stop everyone to bring the whole class back together and disrupt the flow of those students who are on task.
In this situation, teachers might choose to circulate the room an issue individual reminders to inattentive students. A hand on the desk, a question about their work, a quiet reminder in the ear, may all do the trick in different contexts.
Attention challenges aren’t only about students being displaying inattention. Students can be attending to the wrong thing. For example, students attending to word choice when the teacher needs them to be thinking harder about sentence structure. This is another context in which circulation and individual reminders might be the best bet because the challenge is not to secure the attention but to maintain it being on the right thing.
More from teaching on purpose….
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