By Staff
The role of non-verbal communication in the classroom seems to only have a positive effect on learning. It helps students to grasp a better understanding of the concepts and all around results in better learning.
Non-verbal communication can include sounds, gestures, body movements, or facial expressions. This communication works because of the way we recognize eye contact, gestures, and body language, and all of this without words is still able to send us the message. Before children can speak, they can recognize and understand nonverbal communication way more than verbal.
Nonverbal communication is also already very common. More than 80% of the things you get across, are not said, and more likely communicated through your body and what you do with it. Teachers often use body language instead of words to get their classes attention. They will do things like standing still or raising their hand up and freezing it to let the class know that they want to have their attention. Often during talks or lectures teachers will use gestures to make what they are saying more sensible. Sometimes they pause in their talking, but leave their hands up to let people know that they have not finished saying what they had to say.
Another common nonverbal gesture is just putting your finger up to your face, in a shushing way. Teachers use this many times during a presentation, or when watching a video to avoid interrupting the whole class, to get a few students to be quiet. There are many things like that. Like in a silent classroom, holding up your hand with the ASL sign signifying that you need to use the restroom and the teacher nods yes, can elude the whole class having to turn their attention towards that. Many younger students in elementary schools use these signs, so it wouldn’t be hard to implement it into high schools and middle schools, even just teaching words like help, sit, or stop.
Many times during a class teachers have to tell a singular student to quiet down or stop interrupting. If classes had cues to let people know that they need to be quiet, maybe we could avoid the teacher having to raise their voice. Not only would it be helpful, but it may also help students where raised voices give them stress.
Hand gestures aren’t the only things that could be used, things like colored papers could convey the concept teachers are trying to share. Like a stop sign print on paper could tell that the volume is too loud, or a pencil to show that students should still be working. Lydia Browne thinks, “they are helpful; however, it shouldn’t be the only thing used by a teacher all the time, because nonverbal cues can be misinterpreted, the use of both can avoid misunderstandings and would be best.”
Teachers should use a mix of verbal and nonverbal to make sure concepts are understood by the majority if not all students. Not everything works well for everyone, so keeping things the same daily doesn’t always work.
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