Director and Principal of University Primary School, Champaign, IL. Research participant in 2019 ASHFoundation New Century Scholars Research Grant Recipient Pasquale Bottalico’s research work on classroom acoustics.
What are some of the obstacles students and teachers experience in the classroom? How does this affect their ability to communicate and learn? What challenges have you noticed in your school?
Ali: Classrooms can be noisy places. Teachers' voices get tired, or sometimes you just can't hear the students properly. In the past, we often thought of it as a "momentary" problem, and assumed it was just something wrong with ourselves rather than our environment. But now I realize one of the biggest obstacles is that we have young kids with young voices and teachers with aging ears—those ranges don’t always match up, especially when the teacher is physically separated from the child. As a result, teachers and students start relying heavily on body language and lip-reading to understand each other.
What often happens is that adults try to fill in the gaps, summarizing what they think the child said, which means the child's actual words get lost. And it doesn't stop there. This communication breakdown affects more than just learning—it seeps into students' social and emotional lives. If you keep asking a child to repeat themselves, eventually, they'll stop. They start believing there's something wrong with the way they're expressing themselves. It takes a lot of courage for kids, especially introverted ones, to speak up in class. But if they feel like they're not being heard, that courage diminishes.
How do these challenges affect their education or quality of life? What difference could better acoustics make?
Ali: It can really drain your energy. When you remove the barrier of not being able to hear clearly, you free up energy for actual communication. Then real dialogue can happen—students and teachers can engage without constantly asking, “Can you say that again?” or “Wait, did you say this?” And it can prevent those moments where the child just nods along, thinking the teacher has corrected them. They might assume they’ve said something wrong, and it chips away at their confidence.
Better acoustics would be a game-changer. I’ve definitely seen students and teachers struggle with this. Sometimes, they compensate by moving closer to one another. In our school, we focus heavily on emotional regulation, so we don’t have teachers yelling or getting frustrated. However, when someone has to raise their voice to be heard, it can be misinterpreted by kids, especially those with trauma, as yelling. It impacts the whole classroom. Improving the acoustics would go a long way toward creating a more supportive, emotionally safe environment.
How did you get involved in this research?
Ali: It started out because of proximity—we’re on the same campus. But what made it even more interesting was that not every classroom here is acoustically the same. We have rooms with carpeting, tile, and different setups, so [Pasquale] had four very different environments to study.
When I understood what [Pasquale] was aiming for, it was a no-brainer. The study was low-interference and high-impact for us. It didn’t disrupt the school day, and they didn’t need extensive parent permissions since they weren’t interviewing anyone. They just wanted to measure sound levels in the classrooms, both with and without students. When I realized they could learn something that would help us; absolutely, I was on board.
What is your commitment to the success of this research? How has this affected the way you view the classroom?
Ali: Our school is built on the idea of a democratic community where everyone’s voice matters. We aren’t the kind of school where teachers dominate the room by giving answers and asking all the questions. So, when certain classrooms have better or worse acoustics, it’s especially frustrating.
I’m deeply committed to creating an environment where children and adults feel heard, where their voices—both literally and figuratively—are amplified. Schools should be places where children listen, feel listened to, and practice listening to others. If we can’t get the physical space right, that’s a major obstacle to our mission. And that’s a huge reason why I’m invested in the success of this research.