Are You Listening?

On Tuesday Sydney's mother, who was a college professor for many years, came to our class as a guest speaker. The topic of our day was Listening. As a talker, I found many of the ideas within the class to be both surprising and helpful. Our discussion on listening applied to us as teachers listening to our students and to helping our students to become better listeners. It was also about helping us as students become better listeners. We began by defining communication, and talking about aspects of communication. Some of the ideas that stuck out to me were the reminder that communication is a two-way street, looking at communication as constantly depicting who we are as people, and the reminder that we are always communicating. We also talked about how, as teachers, we will always be teaching. Every moment that our students, whether at any time in school or when we encounter them outside of school, will be a moment that they are watching us and learning from what we do. When we went on to talk about some bad habits that people have when it comes to listening, I recognized several habits that I have. Two of my biggest bad habits are my emotional reactions to what people are saying, and thinking about what I'm going to say while they're speaking. These are two things that I really need to work on. One of the most interesting things that I learned was that most people remain at a 6th grade auditory vocabulary level, even while they improve their speaking, writing, and reading vocabulary.

After discussing the idea of communication and some of the worst habits of communication, we went on to talk about ways that we can prepare ourselves and ways that we can help our students prepare to listen in the classroom. We took time in small groups to think of ways that we can teach our students to become better listeners. During this time we discussed four aspects, preparing ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Many of us found that these are often intertwined. Some of the ideas that we came up with to use in our classrooms included minimizing distractions, holding students accountable for homework, making sure parents and students are aware of materials needed, doing brain "stretches" in the morning, using a daydream journal, setting clear procedures and following through with them, modeling appropriate emotional responses, having a "safe place" in the classroom, and modeling respect for others. On the whole, I felt that the class was very useful, and I got a lot out of it.