Left to Their Own Devices

First there was the transistor radio. Then, the boombox. The Walkman followed, along with its next generation offspring, the Discman. iPods and tiny MP3 players, as well as smartphones, are more recent gadgets that allow music—piped into the ears via headphones or earbuds, wired or bluetooth—to be the 24/7 accompaniment to each of our lives The sound of silence has been replaced by the sound of whatever your streaming music subscription is playing at the moment.     

In so many classrooms today, students are “working” with one or more earbuds in their ears. Their smartphones are supplying the soundtrack to their school day as they read, write, take notes, watch their teachers teach, and collaborate with peers. Teachers who support leaving students to their own devices for background music say that their students are quieter and better behaved when they listen to music while reading and/or writing. They subscribe to the misquoted adage from playwright William Congreve: “Music soothes the savage beast.” (The actual quotation, I discovered, is, “Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast.” Who knew?) Other teachers ignore the earbuds, perhaps believing that the student is unplugged or the music is paused, though I almost always eventually see that student reach into a hoodie pocket to skip a song that shuffled onto their playlist or make a new music selection.

When left to their own devices, teenagers will choose music over silence, and most will justify that preference by saying that it helps them concentrate and that they are more productive when music is playing. Research, however, shows that in most cases, student-selected music interferes with cognitive tasks in academic subject areas. Here are a few nuggets of information teachers can use to shape their in-class listening policies and respond to teenagers who disagree with them:

• The consensus among education researchers is that music has a negative effect on tasks relying on linguistic comprehension, writing, and memory.
• The exceptions to this are creative production (like working on an artwork), productivity (like mindless assembly line work), and perhaps exercises that involve spatial manipulation (you know, useful things like folding up a piece of paper, punching some holes in it, and predicting what it will look like when it is unfolded). The so-called Mozart Effect that had parents rushing to purchase classical music CDs to make their babies smarter is a little more limited than originally reported, and there’s nothing magical about Mozart.
• Music with lyrics is bad for learning. One study (discussed in this article) showed that university students who listened to music with lyrics while reviewing for a test scored more than 60% worse than their peers who studied in silence. Students listening to music with no lyrics did better than those who studied with lyrics, but the no-music students performed the best.   
• Silence increases reading comprehension, too.
• Introverts are more adversely affected by background music while reading and studying. While music had a negative effect on reading comprehension and memory for introverts, their classmates who were extraverts did not see a notable decline in memory, only in comprehension, said a 1997 report by Furnham and Bradley.    
• “Fast and loud” music disrupts reading comprehension the most, according to a 2011 study by Thompson, Schellenberg, and Letnic.
• Musicians’ brains seem to be wired differently. Listening to music has a more severely negative effect on language comprehension for trained musicians than for non-musicians. Language and music appear to be processed by the same neural networks in the brain. Visualspatial test results were the same for musicians and non-musicians. This article explains further.   
• A 2010 study by Anderson and Fuller showed that not only does reading comprehension performance decline significantly when junior high students are listening to music, but it declines more significantly for those who say they prefer listening to music while they read. In other words, the kids who protest the most when you tell them to take out their earbuds are the ones who benefit the most from your asking them to do so.   
• Writing is affected negatively by music, too, even if the writer is not paying attention to it. According to a 2001 study by Ransdell and Gilroy, college students who had music playing while they were writing expository essays using a word processing program had more difficulty with word fluency. They generated fewer words per minute and had to delete more prior to their final drafts.   
• Music can improve one’s mood, so maybe there’s some usefulness when you’re dealing with surly teenagers.  
• There's abundant research about the myth of multitasking and how we can't simultaneously focus on texting, tending to social media, and doing cognitive tasks, but today I'm sticking to the topic of background music. 

I remember a department head of mine who would have team meetings with classical music quietly playing in the background. I left every meeting with Vivaldi stuck in my head no clue about the content of the meeting.

Apparently, I’m not alone in having these challenges.

If we aim to make our classrooms places where students engage in rich reading experiences, produce thoughtful writing, think deeply, and talk about their learning, the research is overwhelmingly in support of banning the earbuds and turning off the background music. Most young people who are literally left to the own devices aren’t going to make decisions that are best for their learning. Stretching students to become uncomfortable with silence and to be alone with their thoughts might be doing them a favor in the long run.  

The only trick is going to be convincing them of that. . . .

On Community Conversations and Glitter

On Monday night, I participated in a Community Conversations event in Dallas. Though it was my first time to attend, these meetings—initially a response to the unthinkable violence in Dallas and elsewhere over the summer—have been taking place once a month since July.

For two and a half hours, a group of mostly strangers—young, old, white, black, Christian, Jewish, atheist, straight, gay, male, female—gathered to talk, to listen, to ask questions, and to seek to understand one another. That evening, we talked about our beliefs. We shared stories about violence and prejudice. We lamented the turbulent political climate. We made ourselves vulnerable, sharing thoughts many of us had never vocalized before. We faced truths about ourselves and one other. No topic was off limits: religion, race, politics, social media, education, parenting, fear, bigotry. We didn’t always agree, but we did always listen and seek to understand.

That evening was a sharp contrast to what I have seen blowing up on Facebook and Twitter in recent months with regard to the upcoming election. People on both sides are spewing opinions as if they were facts, posting and reposting videos and fake news stories as if they were truths, and ridiculing and/or attacking anyone who doesn’t share their political stance. No one is listening. No one is seeking to understand.

According to brain researchers, when people are in a state of extreme stress, fear, panic, or trauma, their brains enters a state of “fight, flight, or freeze” as a means of self-protection. The “upstairs” brain shuts down, and the “downstairs” brain takes over as they enter alarm mode. When the brain is in alarm mode, no learning occurs since self-preservation is the brain’s sole concern.

It seems as if the brains of most everyone in my social media network have shifted into alarm mode. So much anxiety, fear, and panic exist that the thinking parts of our brains have been hijacked by our downstairs brains. Calm discussion and intellectual discourse have disappeared, only to be replaced by angry rants, fearful diatribes, and vitriolic attacks. Sadly, we are hearing the same things from the candidates themselves.

As educators, our classrooms are microcosms of the world. Students of all backgrounds and beliefs gather to be educated. But so much can get the way of that objective. For one thing, many students come to us dealing with a lot of emotional noise and trauma.  Their brains aren’t ready for learning because they’re in alarm mode, always vigilant because they’re never sure where the next attack is coming from. Sometimes, the students’ trauma is due to life circumstances outside of school; other students are living the trauma in our classrooms on a daily basis as they face the cruelty of growing up in a social environment that isn’t always kind or supportive.

Students at Momentous Institute—a lab school in Dallas educating urban children from three years old to 5th grade, many of whom come from trauma backgrounds—learn about their own emotional well-being as part of their everyday curriculum. One technique the students use to help manage their stress involves a jar filled with glitter suspended in a liquid. The students are taught to think of the jar in terms of their own emotional well-being. They shake up the jars and observe the tiny specks of glitter whirling wildly, and they equate that with their own feelings when they’re in alarm mode, when stress, fear, anger, and trauma have taken over. The students learn to watch the jar mindfully and wait for the glitter to settle, just as sometimes they need to pause, take some deep breaths, and settle their own emotional glitter before they’re ready to learn.

Our nation needs to settle its glitter. Our social media feeds need to settle their glitter.

Our students need to settle theirs, too.

We can’t do much to make the myriad of issues our students face outside of school disappear, but we do have some control over what goes on while students are in our classrooms. The efforts we take to build community—to allow our students to interact with, learn about, gain respect for, and grow to trust others who may not be like them—are not wasted. When our classrooms and hallways become emotionally safe spaces for students, we open new possibilities for intellectual and personal growth.  

Since the outside world isn’t setting much of a good example of how to engage in civil discourse, how to discuss a topic, how to weigh multiple sides of an issue, how to disagree without attacking, and—perhaps most importantly—how to listen, we must teach our students these habits ourselves. If a student leaves school with a disposition for empathetic listening and a desire to understand that outweighs his need to be understood, we will have done work that will change his life forever.

My first visit to Community Conversations underscored for me my own need to have dialogue with people who are not like me. By seeking to understand others, I gain empathy for them. I may not change my mind, but I learn more about who they are and where they are coming from. And I see that, even though we may have wildly disparate experiences and be seemingly polar opposites in terms of opinions, we share many basic human needs in common.   

So many of our negative interactions with others stem from fear, ignorance, or lack of understanding. This is why creating a safe space, building community, and fostering authentic dialogue should be top priorities in every educator’s practice. If we can learn to listen to one another, to seek to understand others, and to settle our glitter, we can live and learn peacefully together in school and in the wider world.