Three silent headphone sessions any teacher can run

An incursion company will come to your school, run an hour, and leave. The going rate is around $14.50 plus GST per student, usually capped near forty children. Two classes through in one hour is $580 to $640.

The equipment is not what you are paying for. You are paying for the facilitator, and the facilitator leaves.

A teacher can run these sessions. Below are three that work, what each one needs, and roughly how long it takes. No training, no facilitator, no special hall.

What you need for all three

• One headset per student, plus about 10% spares. Thirty students, order thirty-three.
• A transmitter — one for a single channel, two if you want both running at once.
• A phone or laptop for the audio, and a headset microphone if you want to talk over it.
• Somewhere to charge them. A multi-port charger does the lot overnight.

Range is up to thirty metres, which covers a hall, a library floor, a courtyard or a corner of an oval.

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1. Silent dance — Health and Physical Education

Year levels: Foundation to Year 6 Time: 40 to 50 minutes Space: hall, covered area, or a flat patch of oval

This is the incursion session, run by you.

Warm-up (10 min). Everyone on channel one, same track. Simple follow-the-leader movements — you demonstrate, they copy. The headphones do something useful straight away: nobody is asking what the next move is, because your voice is in their ear over the music.

Movement games (20 min). Freeze dance works better with headphones than with a speaker, because you cut the audio and the room goes instantly silent — no speaker tail, no arguing about who moved. Statues, mirror-partners, and follow-the-leader in small groups all work the same way.

Two-channel challenge (10 min). Split the class. Channel one gets one track, channel two gets another. Neither group can hear the other’s music. Then they swap and try to guess what the other group was dancing to. This is the bit children remember, and it only works with two channels.

Cool down (5 min). Back to one channel, slow track, stretches.

Why it beats a speaker: you can run it outside without disturbing a single other class, and every child hears you at the volume that suits them.

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2. Two-channel storytelling — English and Music

Year levels: Foundation to Year 4 Time: 30 to 40 minutes Space: classroom or library corner

Two channels, two experiences of the same story, in the same room at the same time.

Set up. You read the story live on channel one. On channel two, the same story with a soundtrack behind it — music, weather, footsteps, whatever suits the book.

Run it. Half the class on each channel. They listen to the whole story at the same time, in the same room, hearing completely different things.

Swap and discuss. Change channels and run it again, or go straight to the conversation:

• What did the music make you feel that the plain reading did not?
• Where did the sound tell you something the words did not?
• Which version felt faster?

That is a straight line into how sound and mood work, and the children have just experienced both sides of it rather than being told about it.

Setting up the second channel takes a phone and a free audio app. You can record the soundtrack version yourself the night before, or use an audiobook.

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3. Silent languages

Year levels: Year 3 and up Time: 30 minutes Space: one classroom

Languages faculties rarely have equipment like this, and it solves a real problem: one room, one teacher, two ability levels.

Set up. Channel one runs the beginner material — slower, more repetition. Channel two runs the extension material at native pace.

Run it. Students sit wherever they like. You move between them. Nobody knows who is on which channel unless they choose to say, which takes the sting out of being on the slower one.

The variation worth trying: put the same passage on both channels, but one at normal speed and one slowed down. Students switch back and forth themselves and find the speed they can follow. That is not something you can do with a classroom speaker.

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What this costs against an incursion

A Group Trainer 10 kit is ten Pro-Gen Gold headsets, four transmitters, a headset microphone, a charger that does the lot overnight, and a hard case it all lives in. $1,400, shipped free, with a twelve month replacement warranty.

One incursion hour for two classes costs $580 to $640. Two and a bit incursion hours and you have bought the kit outright, and every class in the school can have a turn, every term, for years.

For a whole class at once you want thirty headsets rather than ten. Ring the numbers up accordingly, or run the session in rotation with a group of ten while the rest do something else — which many teachers prefer anyway.

The paperwork your business manager will ask about

• Australian company, Australian ABN. Invoice or purchase order, whichever your school runs on.
• Meets ACMA standards and is RCM marked. That is the compliance line procurement wants.
• Twelve month replacement warranty — a replacement, not a repair queue.
• Free shipping anywhere in Australia.

Try it before you spend the budget

If you are not sure it suits your school, hire a kit for a week first. Run a real session with a real class, then decide. It is a far better test than any demonstration we could give you.

Send us a message and one of us will answer — we are a two-person family business, so it will not be a call centre.