Good teaching requires a certain amount of repetition. But it makes me crazy when a student asks a question, I answer, and then another student asks the same question.

There are moments when that repeated question comes that another student will say, “She just answered that” and then go on to repeat word-for-word what I just said or paraphrase it. I love those moments because a clear message is sent from peer to peer.

But how to avoid this in the future? Not for the rest of this year — that is a lost cause — but for next year.

Rebecca Alber in a post on Edutopia recommends be the teacher who repeats nothing starting on Day 1. She has three other big suggestions as well, but that is the one I am going to implement starting next year.

My colleague who has the same issue reminds herself that the repeated questions are just caused by anxiety. That will be my mantra for the next few weeks. These students are just anxious and that anxiety shuts down that part of the brain — or hobbles it. Anxiety reduces working memory, makes people unfocused, causes them to worry and ask internal questions, makes them unreceptive to any communication.

How can I teach students to listen better? Michael Webb has a discussion called “Mindful Listening” for how to foster more attentive listening both from the speaker’s and the audience’s point of view. The post is from September 2008 but is definitely something to read carefully. His main suggestion to to teach listeners to become more aware of their own internal bodily sensations and tensions and get them to relax. This suggests that at the beginning of the year, build in moments during class when I have the class do a tension check and focus on relaxing. I could do that even now and that might help as we get closer to exams and the anxiety levels spike.

Another study by two researchers at Takming University of Science Technology gave a helpful explanation of the idea of “cognitive load.” Cognitive load is “the total amount of mental activity performed by working memory at any point in time.” They stress that working memory is finite and thus students cannot be expected to hold too much information in working memory or that produces confusion and inattentiveness and anxiety. They identified three types of cognitive load:

1. intrinsic cognitive load
2. extraneous cognitive load
3. germane cognitive load

Teachers cannot change intrinsic CL which is defined by basic information being communicated. Teachers can change extraneous CL which is caused by the lack of instructional support. In other words, if the teacher does not supply visuals, students must use working memory to hold an excessive amount of detail. Germane CL is when the students are able to use intrinsic CL to construct new connections and systems of memory.

This article also underscored the complexity of the activity of learning by listening. The student must:

1. comprehend what is being said
2. retain relevant information in working memory
3. integrate the information with what has preceded and what will follow
4. adjust their understanding of the entire lesson based on prior and incoming information

They suggested several ways to improve listening comprehension — not all of them relevant for my purposes. But they suggested supplying audio-visual aids, repeating important points, giving lots of encouragement to build confidence, and conduct pre-listening activities.

I feel like I do many of those things already by using a smart board and Haiku. But I could try using listening practice games such as giving them a series of words or numbers and see if they can repeat them back. Or having them do some memorization of poetry to strengthen the memory muscle.