Student Centered Approaches/Techniques for Reading:

1. Questioning – Good readers ask purposeful questions before, during, and after reading to determine meaning or further understanding.
2. Imaging (Visualizing) - Readers use a variety of sensory and conceptual processes (mental mapping) to understand texts. They imagine the sights, sounds, smells, see motion, hear dialogue and develop meaningful ways to develop their understanding.
3. Predicting – Predicting involves the use of text clues and the students’ prior knowledge as they make logical forecasts about what will occur next in the text.
4. Inferring - Inferring is a difficult strategy that separates good readers from poor readers. High-level thinking is needed when students use text clues and prior knowledge to draw conclusions about past and present events.
5. Making Connections – Good readers use their schema or prior knowledge to help them understand the text. When reading, they make connections to text, experiences or general world knowledge.
6. Monitoring – Keeping track of comprehension is what monitoring is all about. When students monitor their comprehension, they check to make sure they are visualizing, pay attention to unknown words, and notice when they do not understand text or are even not paying attention to what they are reading.
7. Summarizing – Summarizing is a difficult and complex strategy for many students. They need to separate the important parts of the text from the unimportant details as they tell the text in sequence. Summarizing is also the big picture, author’s message, theme and main idea all rolled into one.
8. Evaluating – Good readers are like little judges, weighing and evaluating before, during, and after reading. They evaluate whether they liked the text or not and how they did as readers. (Cranage, 8)

Student Centered Approaches to Speaking & Listening:

1. Focus On Teaching The Skill Of Listening (yes those A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.S do help).

Break the skill into identifiable components for students and then practice, role play, make posters and dramatize scenarios.

Use positive reinforcement to help with this and/or reward students for using the skill appropriately.

2. Model Good Listening For Your Students.

So often we are thinking about our response to a student rather than really listening to them.

Use the ‘counselling’ skill of rephrasing or restating what students say to enhance your own listening.

Ask students to restate yours or others points of view.

Insist on one person speaking at a time either in whole class discussions, paired or group work.

Demonstrate the skill to the class by drawing their attention to your listening with younger grades, having older grades deconstruct what effective listening looks like, sounds like, feels like.

3. Get To Know Your Students.

Find out about their interests, hobbies, music and sport, families etc. Kids will listen more to teachers they feel are interested in them and know them.

In high school, where you may teach up to 150 students use memory tricks, refer to school photos or take notes so you can use the knowledge in your conversations with students.

See some of our articles on how to build relationships with students.

4. Use Reflective Listening…

to defuse tricky situations.

Saying ‘Joey I can see you are upset (disappointed, frustrated, sad) validates a student’s feelings, provides the language to describe the feelings and can help to reduce the intensity of the feelings allowing the student to move forward.

Listening to students can give you insight into their state of mind.

5. Give Students A Voice…

…about the issues that impact them, i.e. their learning, their assessment, their classroom, their school values students need to feel heard and understood.

They will more readily accept the status quo if they feel they have been heard. What About Student Voice?

6. Get Everyone’s ‘Voice In The Room’.

Give students an opportunity to speak at the beginning of class by having a “check in”.

You could use this as an orientation to the lesson e.g in Maths, everyone thinks of the highest number they have seen today or as an emotional check in e.g.use a colour to describe how you are feeling.

7. Talk Less.

As a general rule, kids can effectively listen for about half their age in minutes, so for a child of 10 that’s about 5 minutes, for a 15 yr old, that’s about 7.5 minutes!

Mix up the activities in the classroom so that they are talking, writing, moving and listening in a variety of ways.

Here are more ideas on how to use variety in the classroom.

8. Use ‘Cold Calling’.

Have you noticed that it is usually the same 4 or 5 students who answer questions?

Introduce cold calling (no hands up), where any student may be expected to answer a question or explain a concept to the class.

Dylan William has a simple strategy of writing students’ names on paddle pop sticks and then randomly drawing out the name of the lucky person who gets to answer.

If you would prefer a more high tech system, find a list of randomize apps here.

To ensure students feel safe to ‘have a go’, develop a culture of risk-taking in your class by encouraging thinking rather than expecting the ‘correct’ answer.

Not sure about how to develop a positive class culture? See 6 Ways to build a positive classroom culture.

(Teaching Strategies to Increase Your Student's Listening Skills)

Student Centered Approaches for Writing: