You wouldn't design a classroom without good lighting – so why accept one without enhancement for the teacher's most important teaching tool – the voice?
P.C.Werth Soundfield systems use a lightweight, wireless microphone to transmit a teacher's voice to a special base-station. This then amplifies, enhances speech frequencies and broadcasts it from carefully placed speakers to the whole class. Simple, intuitive and outstandingly effective from day one!
Although good acoustical design in a classroom can help make the teacher's voice clearer, installing a PC Werth Soundfield system is the single most cost-effective way of boosting a child's comprehension in a noisy classroom environment.
The science of classroom acoustics is based on a simple but often unrecognized fact – a child's auditory processes don't fully develop until their teens. Adults can listen more effectively in noisy surroundings because they have fully developed neural pathways and the experience to fill in any gaps in the vocal signals they hear and understand what is said. Children don't have fully developed brains, nor do they have a history of learned words and concepts – after all, that's what they are in school to acquire! So a teacher's voice must be crystal clear and, to ensure equal access to everyone in the classroom, pitched at the same volume throughout the classroom area.
But several factors get in the way of clear vocal communication:
Distance is your voice's no 1 enemy
Audibility decreases dramatically as the distance from the speaker increases. Pupils seated at the front may typically receive about 83% of your speech 'signal'. But that figure drops quickly down to 66% for the middle rows, to just 55% at the back. Also, if you turn away from the class to write on the whiteboard or consult notes, the problem is made much worse for all the children wherever they sit.
Noise can defeat even the strongest voice
Noise from chatting classmates, projectors, PCs, furniture, other classes, and traffic, to take several common examples, can all add up to subtly destructive background level, often averaging as much as 50 decibels – about the same as a busy street. Since any teacher's comfortable speaking volume is not much greater it's easy to see how pupils might have trouble distinguishing a teacher's words from background distractions.
Reverberation compounds your voice's problems
The smooth desk, high ceilings, painted walls, windows and uncarpeted floors common to many of today's classrooms reflect and amplify all kinds of distracting noise, with dramatic impact on speech understanding.
Speech forms the majority of what is experienced in the classroom. A poor acoustic environment has negative effects on both pupils and staff. But improve this one aspect of teaching and you will reap enormous benefits in a very short time.
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