Have you ever attended a long meeting only to realize you don’t remember half of what was discussed? If yes, you’re not alone! Many people, especially students, experience similar events when they somehow fail to give full attention while listening. Most people are passive listeners by default, and their minds wander elsewhere, even when someone in front of them is saying something important. While it may not look like something crucial on the surface level, we at Delhi Public School Kangra, positioned among the top 5 CBSE schools in Kangra, believe it has the potential to shape the academic journey of students.
Active or attentive listeners pay full attention to what is being said. Hence, they’re able to understand the subject matter with greater clarity. It significantly helps them ace their academic tests, boosting their overall progress. Conversely, passive listeners only retain a small percentage of information because of their inattentiveness, resulting in mediocre performance and slow academic growth. If you’re wondering whether you can learn effectively without active listening, we’d say ‘no.’ Active listening is an essential soft skill that influences a person’s learning quality.
In this blog post today, let us delve deeper into the topic and see how active listening can help improve learning outcomes in students. So, let’s read on. Shall we?
Active Listening and Effective Learning: What’s the Link?
You may be wondering how something as simple as active listening can contribute to effective learning. Well, the following points will help solve your doubts.
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Enhanced Focus and Concentration
Since active listening demands full attention, it requires a person to put all of their focus on the information being delivered. It thus helps to tune out distractions and zero in on the information being presented. At Delhi Public School Kangra, we believe this heightened focus and concentration is necessary for absorbing every detail and identifying the topic’s nuances and underlying principles.
A simple way of maintaining focus is to maintain eye contact with the speaker (teacher) and avoid multitasking. This simple tip can help your kids gradually transform from passive to active listeners and make significant progress in their learning journey.
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Improved Information Processing
Being a passive listener is the easiest way to remain an average student. If you really want your kids to improve and excel in their academics, you must try to make them switch to being active listeners. Attentive listening enhances a person’s ability to process and understand new information instead of merely hearing words. This way, they will eventually begin engaging with the information better, enabling their brain to organize it and make sense of it more effectively. This improved information processing leads to better comprehension and retention.
You can also ask your kids to try creating mental images of everything the teacher says and find the most apt analogies for new concepts for easy understanding. These steps can help them identify areas that require more clarification, thereby helping to fill all knowledge gaps.
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Sharper Critical Thinking Skills
We at Delhi Public School Kangra have always believed that effective learning is devoid of rote memorization and involves plenty of critical thinking throughout the journey. While there are numerous ways to hone one’s critical thinking abilities, we recommend focusing more on sharpening active listening skills. When you focus on listening attentively and processing information, you naturally begin to analyze, evaluate, and question what you’re learning.
This critical assessment takes you beyond a surface-level understanding of any topic, helping you grasp deeper meanings and implications. So, teach your kids that while attending classes, they must not just listen to words passively but constantly engage with the information by considering the author’s motivations and the development of characters, etc. It will ensure they don’t absorb information at face value but accept it after a full critical evaluation.
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Better Retention and Recall
Whether your child is in the pre-primary or higher-secondary, they must have sharp information retention and recall ability for continued success. Hence, if you want to improve your children’s retention and recall capability to enable them to perform well not just in academics but throughout life, start focusing on making them active listeners. Teach them to engage multiple senses and cognitive processes and also pay full attention to whatever is being said to them.
When they do so, it will create multiple memory pathways in their brain, making it easier to remember and recall information when needed. So, if you feel your child has poor retention and recall, ask them to summarize the key points after you are done discussing the topic with them.
Conclusion
Active listening might appear like an ordinary classroom skill, but it is incredibly powerful and can transform the entire learning journey of an individual. Active listening compels a person to pay full attention to the information being delivered and, thereby, enables them to actively engage with it through questions and mental imagery and also connect back with ideas, information, and more. We at Delhi Public School Kangra, ranked among the top 5 CBSE schools in Kangra, have seen time and again that the most active listeners go on achieving proficiency in not just their academic endeavors but also continue gaining success in all of their endeavors beyond the boundaries of our school, too! Hence, by means of this blog post today, we would like to urge you all to help your kids grow into active listeners, and you’ll soon witness them faring better in their learning activities.