How can making one change to a classroom radically improve teaching and learning?
How can making one change to a classroom radically improve teaching and learning?
Everyone involved in teaching and learning is concerned with the visual environment. We write clearly so that the child can read. We recognise the importance of adjusting the lighting in the room to compensate for gloomy days (lights on) or brilliant sunshine (blinds down).
We ensure that computer screens can be read easily, and we take steps if there is any problem.
But when it comes to hearing, we have a different attitude – a misplaced sense of indifference or helplessness.
There’s a feeling that little can be done to combat extraneous sounds. For instance, cutting down noise from outside the class is either impossible (have you tried shushing a playground or diverting a flight path recently?) or probably involves expensive sound proofing. And as for cutting out the sound of computers or scraping chairs emanating from inside the classroom, where does one begin?
And yet the problem with noise and hearing in the classroom goes much deeper: after all, ear infections are sometimes cited as the most common health complaint among young people, making difficulties with hearing much more prevalent than problems with seeing.
When these are combined with the fact that most classrooms have been built with no consideration for acoustics at all, it is easy to understand how, at any one time, about a quarter of the average class will be struggling to make proper sense of all that the teacher says.
Of course, if your school is not under a flight path the problem is somewhat reduced, but for most of us there are plenty of sounds interfering with those that we want the children to hear.
There is, however, a solution – and that is Soundfield, a remarkably low cost sound system which can be adjusted to the particular needs of each individual room and which ensures that every child can clearly hear the teacher’s voice, making it a simple, one-step solution to more effective teaching and learning.
There are more details and a free trial available at www.soundfield.info