Positive Silence

Helen Lees contacted Just this Day last year and met up with the Just this Day team. Her research and interest in Positive Silence in Schools and the conversations with educationalists who employ Silence as a positive aid to teaching and learning has developed into this year’s Exploration of Stillness Debate. Her interest forms the base of the discussion between the four women speakers.
She found that:
‘The ability of a school to use and benefit from silence is strongly linked to the ethos of a school. Schools which listen to the voice of their students will probably be better able to use and benefit from silent practices. This is because silence creates freedoms and an educational environment needs to be able to respect that. There is no educational reason why silent practices in some way should not be an integral part of a child’s education. In fact, when we take various strands of research on school settings and put them together, along with emerging research on the benefits of silence in people’s lives, what we see is that education without silence does not make much sense.
In areas of better learning outcomes, better interpersonal relationships, better self-esteem and well-being measures, silence in a person’s life and an individual’s education is shown throughout the relevant research literature to be a benefit. Atmospheres without silence are not so lucky. They manifest various problems. Curiously, where silence operates it brings with it advantage. And, if this is a potential school improvement measure, well, it’s free! Essentially it is something that we all have recourse to. Every human being, given the right encouragement and perhaps awareness for it, can make silence a useful and valuable part of their education.
So why isn’t silence operating as a school improvement measure in all schools? Is it ignorance of its potential? Perhaps it is to do with the current structures that function in schools to order the school day… People sitting quietly and closing their eyes looks like a failure in a busy curriculum schedule, does it not? This is a wrong-headed attitude. It is a failure to be able to embrace other possibly better ways of doing things. Ways which might seem unusual at first but after a little understanding can come to be essential educational tools. I have no doubt that education needs silence. It can benefit children in important ways. They will receive a better all-round education if silence is a part of their experience in some form.¡¦
Helen Lees book, Silence in Schools, due in April 2012 will be published by Trentham Books, ISBN: 9781858564753