“If listening required looking the telephone would never have worked”
A quick Google search will bring up pages of results indicating that forced eye contact can be damaging, or harmful, or even painful for people who are neurodivergent and particularly those who are autistic. We love the blog piece related to this, Controlling “How” Kids Learn by Occupational Therapist Greg Santucci - check it out here.
Despite this, many teachers and coaches ask their students to look at them when they are talking or ask students to practice Whole Body Listening. There is a long-held belief that eye contact equates to attention and conversely that a lack of eye contact means that someone is not paying attention, or is rude or uninterested in what the speaker is saying. It can actually be harder for an autistic or neurodivergent individual to listen to a speaker if they are also required to give them eye contact or look at them whilst they are talking.
Remember your students are going to learn best when their sensory needs are met and their individual learning styles respected.
If you are a teacher, what can you do to check that a student has listened to and processed the information if they aren’t giving you eye contact?
Download the My Way of Listening sheet from Awekids and fill it out with your swimmer or include it in your enrollment pack for parents to fill in together with their child and return to you.
Keep it simple – don’t use over complicated language, say it how it is and break information into segments, leave just enough time for the student to process but not too much time that their attention wanders.
Break down your instruction into two parts, first explain and then demonstrate or give a visual example – Ask your student to first listen and then watch, give appropriate processing time between your spoken instruction and the visual example or demonstration.
Cue your student to let them know that what you are about to say is important; you may want to cue with a visual card, by signing or with consent, by touch rather than relying solely on an auditory cue.
You can ask a student to show/demonstrate – Can you show me how we are going to do the next exercise?
If your student is speaking/verbal, you can ask a student to repeat back what you have said and follow up with comprehension questions to ensure understanding.
If you are teaching online or virtually, you can encourage the use of captioning or subtitling – this can be really valuable to some autistic individuals when it comes to processing auditory information, it’s a visual back-up for what is being said whilst also being inclusive of any deaf learners. If you are in a classroom and teaching in person you may want to consider a system where captioning can be shown on a screen.
Using these techniques can not only serve you as a teacher in confirming attention and listening in a student without forcing eye contact, but can be used to boost a students confidence, for example by choosing them to demonstrate a skill that you have explained that happens to be one of their strengths.