 So we're taking a look at these couple of videos at listening in context, meaning listening in a variety of different contexts and how we can improve our listening competence in some specific situations. So for this video, I want to take a look at listening at school. How can we use our more effective listening competence to improve our lives at school? So first of all, let's talk about why this is important. Why should we listen better at school? Why is listening an important skill to have for us in school? First of all, better grades. It's no surprise. I don't think that students who develop more effective listening skills tend to get better grades. They understand things more. They're more attentive in class. They're taking in more information. They just, I mean, you see better grades. So that's a benefit of more effective listening skills. It can also decrease your study time. Listening effectively in class and listening effectively in a lot of different situations at school can decrease your study time. You won't have to spend as much time going back to review materials and looking at things like that. That doesn't mean you won't have to study and you shouldn't review material, but it can decrease that study time. When you get it the first time around, you won't have to go back and find it another two or three times after that as much. It can also impress your professors. If they see you listening, they see you paying attention, they can tell that you're listening and as a professor, I can tell you that that is the case. We can tell who's listening and who's not, whether we indicate that or not. But if you are listening, if you're putting in the time, you're putting in the effort, you are more likely to get the benefit of it out. If your assignment is going to be a little bit late or if you have a question, excuse me, you're going to get the benefit of the doubt from that professor a little bit more because they're going to note that you are a listener, that you're doing the work. And you're just going to improve your learning overall. Your learning experience is going to be enhanced when you're a better listener. You're going to, again, pick up more information. You're going to have access to more knowledge as a result of more effective listening skills. That's another reason. Those are all good reasons that we listen at school and should work to improve and enhance our listening abilities and listening competence in the classroom. What can we do then to improve our educational listening, listening in the classroom? We can be prepared first of all physiologically. We need to prepare our bodies to listen and that partly has to do with things like getting enough sleep and eating the right kinds of food that aren't going to make us drowsy and are going to provide us with good energy and just being prepared physiologically to sit for periods of time. That can be tough in and of itself and taking care of our bodies to take care of stress, the negative stress and enhance the use stress, the good stress that we have in our bodies. If we take care of our bodies, that's going to help us physiologically be prepared to listen more effectively. We also need to prepare ourselves psychologically. We need to prepare our bodies to listen, but we also need to prepare our mind to listen. Listening is not a natural thing for us to do necessarily. Effective listening is sort of unnatural. We have to prepare ourselves psychologically. Going in, okay, I'm going to need to focus and pay attention. I need to clear all this other stuff out, set it aside for now so that I can be prepared mentally and get my mind in the right place for this. What's this professor like? How do I look for key ideas in their lecture and things? We need to prepare ourselves psychologically as we get ready to listen in the classroom as well. We've got to be able to triage information and sort out what is necessary and what's not necessarily. This goes along with the next one as well. We need to identify key ideas. We triage information by understanding that not everything the professor says is equally important. Within that, we need to be able to identify those key ideas and pull them out, identify what is important and then what are the key ideas behind that and the supporting information behind that so that we can make a record of that in mentally and in our notes and so forth and just discover not only what's important for not knowledge, but also in terms of grades, what's important to that professor? What's important to that professor is more likely to show up on the test. We can identify those key ideas, triage that information, kind of sift through things and identify what has value and what doesn't and then identify the key ideas within that. We also need to be able to just find our system, find what works for you in the classroom. That's going to be different for every student. Some students take tons and tons of notes. Some students don't take notes at all and they have a different system. They record the lecture maybe on an audio recorder or on their phone or whatever so they can listen back to it. You got to find first of all what's your learning style, how do you learn best and then find the system that works for you. For example, my system had to do with taking lots of notes. I took lots of notes in class and I never looked at them again after that. Looking at my notes didn't do a bit of good for me in terms of studying and understanding the material, but physically writing it down did have an impact. Not only did it help me understand the information, but it helped me listen more effectively because then it was sort of like a game. Can I identify the key ideas here? Can I take these notes? Can I get them down? Can I still pay attention? That's the system that worked for me, but it's going to be different for every person. You need to find what system works best for you in terms of helping you stay focused, helping you stay attentive and listening effectively in that classroom. These were just a few tips for how we can improve our listening in the classroom and improve our listening skills at school in that context. I hope it's been helpful for you. Please let me know if you have any questions. I'd love to hear from you with any questions, comments, things that work for you in listening in the classroom. But in the meantime, I hope that you will give extra focus to your listening skills as they relate to your schoolwork and as they relate in the classroom.