The Art of Listening

I had the opportunity to spend the past two days at a coaching institute with Dr. Jim Knight, a Canadian working at the University of Kansas. Over the two days we explored how to use the role of a coach effectively in supporting classroom practice, which included a day devoted to communication strategies that are critical to good coaching. Listening was,of course, at the top of the list. Everyone knows it's important, and most people likely understand it to be a skill, but how many people work at developing this skill? Rather, don't most of us claim to be "good listeners"?

I think that I CAN be a good listener, but I realized during the conference that there are certain conditions in which I listen better than others. Namely, if I am facilitating a discussion, I listen very attentively. In fact, I would claim it to be a strength of mine. If someone comes to me with a problem, they often thank me afterward for being a good listener. If I am listening to someone speak about a topic that interests me, I can listen with laser-like focus. However, in many other circumstances I believe I do not appear to be listening well at all. When I am participating in a learning-conversation, I often find myself excited by new ideas and get into processing-overdrive which usually leads me to talk more than listen as I work these ideas out. If you were to approach me when I am already engaged in a task, you would likley be equally unimpressed with my listening skills. As a multi-tasker, I often feel that my attention is spread too thin to allow in one more stimulus, and to choose to do so may cause me to forget the other things to which I am trying to attend. This does not for a good listener make. So, how can I be so good and so bad at listening at the same time? And how can I improve?

Dr. Knight suggests that though there are lots of ways to appear to be a better listener (e.g. body language, mirroring, eye contact, paraphrasing), the most effective way to do this is to simply commit to being a good listener. Decide that you genuinely want to hear what the other person is saying and the speaker will feel heard. This resonated with me because it seems to be the common difference between when I listen well and when I don't- it always comes down to my decision to listen for detail or to skim for the main idea. Other strategies offered by Knight included not making assumptions and asking good questions.

Teachers are exceptional multi-taskers. I believe we often feel forced to skim for the main idea in a sea of stimulus, more often than we really listen for detail. How often do we jump to a simple conclusion in order to keep the ship driving forward? It can feel like to pause and ask a clarifying question may cause a ruinous delay or lead to an answer that detours the whole trip.

This morning, my seven-year-old son taught me about how many opportunities I may be missing as a reading teacher. I've just begun reading the first Harry Potter to him (Oh happy day!) and in these first few chapters I find myself pausing to ask him questions to make sure he is a) still awake, b) still listening and c) understanding what is happening in the story in the absence of pictures. Here is a transcript of the conversation we just had. Harry has just moved into Dudley's room full of broken toys.

Me: ...Other shelves were full of books. They were the only things in the room that looked as though they'd never been touched. Noah, what do you think it tells us that the books looked as though they had not been touched?

Noah: That Dudley loves to read.

(At this point, I am concluding that Noah is strugging to make an inference and we shall have to work on this.)

Me: Explain what you mean.

Noah: Like, he really takes good care of his books because loves them so much so they're kept safe on a shelf.

(If you could see my son's room, you would know that this is not a bad inference at all, except that he is relying too heavily on his own experience here and missing some of the text clues.)

Me: Ohhh, I see. But why do you think it says that nearly everything in the room was broken and that all of his toys seem to have been treated so badly?

Noah: OH! He doesn't really like reading at all! He hasn't even touched the books.

This small exchange is illustrative of the types of opportunities that I likely missed in the classroom. Here, I could have stayed with the conclusion that Noah is not yet inferring from text well. However, by responding with a probing question rather than an assumption I learned that he uses his background knowledge very well to make logical inferences, and that with a slight cue back to the text clues, he made an inference that gave him deeper insight into Dudley's character. Choosing to listen here brought me to a very different conclusion.

Choosing to listen more that we speak in the classroom (and in our relationships, as Knight's anecdotes artfully demonstrate), can make us more responsive and effective educators. The challenge is in the choosing. It sometimes does not feel like a choice that is within our power to slow down and teach the people before us, rather than deliver a curriculum. However, as Dr. Knight reminds us, sometimes the solution is simply the committing to the doing.

Resources:

Check out Jim Knight's blog at: http://www.radicallearners.com/