Learning in schools is often a noisy, messy business, and rightly so. We are social animals and we learn most things from other people, either by copying them (as babies do) or through explicit instruction in schools and other places. Actively engaging with new information – thinking deliberately about it – is key to learning, and explicit instruction promotes engagement. Whole-class questioning and response systems are good precisely because they aim to oblige everyone to think deliberately. But regular periods of silence in class also help us learn well.
Being distracted is a key barrier to classroom learning, and it’s a common one. I used to teach in the classroom next to a very diligent teacher who never stopped talking. He would explain a task, ask a lot of questions, do an example with the students – all good things – before setting them off on an independent or semi-independent activity, but while they were then working he would talk incessantly – and I mean non-stop. I think this habit must have significantly distracted the students, and therefore hampered their learning, because we need to be able to focus on a thing to learn well and, obviously, distractions make it harder to focus. If you get one person to start ‘teaching’ you something by talking to you about it and you get someone else to simultaneously talk to you about the News, their dog, or their favourite flavour of crisps, you will immediately see how hard it is to concentrate on the person who is trying to teach you. In class, distraction is of course mostly the result of people chatting instead of concentrating on their work – that is understandable, but it isn’t good for the learning.
Periods of silence should be a common feature of classroom-based lessons. Silence helps us to concentrate our minds on the thing before us, and slotted in between the good noise of classroom learning, periods of silence are also a change from that noisy interactivity. A period of silence might last a minute or be much longer, depending on the activity.
Clearly, silence is no guarantee of concentration on the learning – you might well be thinking hard about ‘Strictly’ when you should be considering why volcanoes erupt – but that’s equally true of any learning activity we do; it isn’t a criticism of working in silence. To learn, we have to engage our thinking brain.
I have always liked the idea of classroom-based lessons starting with a short silent activity – a pre-starter – while everyone is arriving and getting settled, and then lasting for a further brief time. A short silent pre-starter can both make the most of the learning time available and also ease the transition to the main body of the lesson, because students are all – hopefully – then ready to learn.
Effective schooling relies on simple habits and routines like starters and pre-starters. In the hubbub that classroom learning can often resemble, the sound of silence has its place.
