When did listening become passive?

Active listening, active reading (off the bookshelf)

Be wary - this is a “in my day” post from a Gen X professor with 29 years of teaching experience (not counting time as a teaching assistant while in grad school). Reading through David Goodblar’s “The Missing Course”, I can’t help but wonder when in my lifetime listening to a lecture became a passive activity.

I make sure to tell them that they shouldn’t lecture. I tell them about the research that has demonstrated how ineffective lecturing is as a mode of teaching, how passive students don’t learn very much, usually. Instead, I tell them, you’ll want to make your classroom a space in which students do stuff.

Goodblar, 2019. Emphasis not added.

When did listening become passive? Is it related to reading becoming passive? Did this research on lectures control at all for the note taking being utilized by the students in the room during the lectures? The engagement of the lecture by the listeners (questions to the lecturer, responses to questions from the lecturer)? In other words, not all lectures are the same, not all listeners are the same. Active lectures, combined with active listeners, are an activity. Lectures do not need to be passive, any more so than the conversation you have with a friend or family member.

I recall, and still practice, active engagement as an active listener as a student in a course. And yes, I still take courses regularly.

As a lecturer, I expect and encourage active engagement from active listeners. I also teach courses where students “do stuff.” Let’s be clear, a person can choose to passively “doing stuff”, and it is then no more active than passive listening. It’s not whether the course is a lecture or doing stuff…. It’s what the student’s brain is doing during either activity.

If you’re actively engaged and listening or doing - - you’ll learn.

If you’re passively engaged as a passive listener or doer - you will not learn.

The critical determinant for learning is being active. Not the mode of delivery from the professor.

When a professor tells a student - “I wish you would be more active in class, ask questions, add comments.” They are saying - be active because the question you ask is important and the process of adding a comment is important because you being active is critically important and asking questions and making comments are a way for you to be active. There are several other benefits of active listening and engagement in the classroom as well. But if you passively listen and reflexively ask a question or make a comment - that won’t work for learning.

You must be actively listening and actively doing, just like you must actively read, exactly how you want your friend or partner to hear you during a conversation - - actively.