Whole Body Listening

Helping kids understand what "listen" means

Directives such as “sit down” or “go get your backpacks” are easier for young children to understand than commands like, “pay attention” and “listen,” which are abstract, challenging to define, and hard for kids to visualize. Also, listening looks different in different contexts. Think about listening to the teacher on the playground compared to listening during a read aloud. To make listening more concrete and teachable, speech pathologist Susanne Poulette Truesdale (1990) came up with a powerful, and now very popular, concept known as “whole body listening.”

Whole Body Listening explains how different body parts are involved with listening. Not only are ears listening, but eyes are watching, the mouth is quiet, and the brain is thinking and engaged. In later years, others came along and added that the heart is caring. This is about empathy, but also, in my opinion, can be used to reiterate that students should care about their learning.

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I like to sing to my students and have found that calming melodies such as Hush Little Baby and Frere Jacques help settle students (and actually sort of mesmerize them). Therefore, I took the Whole Body Listening concepts and set them to song. I sing this song often at the beginning of each school year as I am teaching new students my expectations for sitting still and listening and being engaged. After a couple of weeks of me holding them accountable for demonstrating whole body listening, we rarely have to sing it again. I do, however, review it after long breaks, such as Thanksgiving Break, Winter Break, and Spring Break.

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The picture shows the poster I display in my classroom. It shows a young girl sitting crisscross applesauce with her hands in her lap. Next to her are the lyrics for the song. (These are primarily to help me remember how the song goes; the students are not yet able to read fast enough to make use of it.) The video is from January. The students already know the song; we are singing it quickly to help them get settled again after being away on a long Winter Break. When I first introduce Whole Body Listening to a new class, we talk about what it means to “watch.” Do you look at the teacher? Do you look at the teacher’s face or at what she is showing? These are crucial nuances that must be discussed. And what is a quiet body? I explain to my students that a moving body is a type of noise; it’s a distraction. I tell them that it’s very hard for me to teach when there is movement in front of me or out of the corner of my eye.

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The abilities and developmental level of each child must be considered when implementing whole body listening. Not all children are yet able to sit still or maintain eye contact. And some just plain do not have the executive functioning required to regulate their bodies. But talking about whole body listening and practicing it in a safe space are a great place to start acquiring these skills.

I hang this in my group areas and, after teaching the song and what it means to truly listen, I can just point to “the listening girl” to remind students that they already know how to listen. To link to this and print it, click here.

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