The Value of Listening

Listening is a fundamental aspect of developing strong interpersonal relationships as well as a meaningful understanding of the world around us. We often find ourselves distracted or overwhelmed which can impede our ability to truly listen and understand one another and purposefully process the experience of learning and life. 

As we work toward developing the key skills, competencies, and dispositions that learners need in order to achieve success in school and in life, we took some time this week to focus on the value of active listening. To promote the value of this important skill, students were partnered with a classmate and engaged in a dialogical interview. Dialogical interviews focus less on making the interviewer's opinions and ideas heard and more on the thoughts and ideas of the interviewee. The purpose of this exercise was to offer students a meaningful opportunity to practice and develop their active listening skills, as well as to continue their important work in developing trusting and caring relationships within our classroom community and bolstering a mutual understanding of one another. Though at times the experience proved to be a challenge for some of our learners, they were eventually able to successfully redirect their thinking and engage in meaningful moments of understanding and empathy. 

Listening exercises like this will be an essential part of the work we're engaging in as they help to develop skills that promote empathy, and effective collaboration, that allow learners to absorb knowledge, be curious, and develop a deep understanding of what they are learning about and experiencing, foster critical thinking, better communicate their ideas, support meaningful discussions about text, and allow learners to see and experience the value of diverse perspectives and creative approaches to problem-solving.

This week's guest bloggers reflect on their listening experience. Enjoy.

Listening is acknowledging the speaker and digging deep to learn more about someone or something.   - @MagicianofIceCream

I learned that listening is always important no matter what you are doing. It's especially important if you are working together with someone. You can hear someone talking and think you're listening, but what about active listening. Active listening is when you hear something and you actually pay attention to it and process it through your brain. We had to use a lot of active listening for our dialogical interviews because it would have been easy to get distracted. All in all, it's very important to listen in life no matter what the situation is.    - @writingmachine

Listening is necessary for solving problems or designing prototypes for projects because you have to listen to what the other person or customer wants or needs to be done in order to create something that meets their needs.     - @seafoam-da-seawing

Listening is an act of kindness because listening makes the other person feel good. It also helps you to see other points of view.    - @potatomonitor

Listening is an important skill for me to develop because I need to listen to people so that I can get to know them better. It's important to pay attention, sit still and not get distracted.    - @Burt

Listening is highly important because no matter what job you have, you will have to listen to others. For example, if you are a business owner and are trying to design a new product, you will need to learn about your customer's needs so that you will understand how to design the product so that it is actually useful to your customer.     - @HarryPotter

I learned that listening is important because it feels nice when you are listened to. It is also important because in life, you are going to need to listen carefully in order to do your job - whether you are a hairstylist, an engineer, or party planner - you have to know how to actively listen.   - @sunflower 

Welcome to a New School Year!

Students are settling in quite nicely and are already experiencing that feeling of being part of a strong and special community. Those first-day jitters are evolving into smiles, laughter, and a sense of comfort and belonging.

We've carefully and deliberately spent our first days of school not just establishing routines and expectations, but more importantly, creating a classroom that is built on community; where students recognize and celebrate shared goals and experiences, are learning to trust one another, feel empowered to contribute, and who feel understood, valued and capable. Those important traits will be nurtured all year long as they provide an essential foundation for developing teamwork, cooperation, communication, flexibility, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.

We asked students to reflect on their experiences over the last several days and write about which ones they found most meaningful, which skills they nurtured in the process, and why and how those skills are important. Here are a handful of reflections from this week's guest bloggers. Enjoy.

My best learning experience so far has been the Cards & Castles challenges because they helped teach me how to deal with failure. Some important skills that I needed to use in order to complete this activity were perseverance (never giving up!) because you had to keep trying even when the castles collapsed. Also, we needed to be flexible in our thinking because there were some really tough times we went through and we had to be able to change the way we were thinking. In the real world, we'll have to find ways to engineer problems in many, many different ways. Experiences like Cards & Castles taught us how to work together to solve problems.   -@gamerhead41 

My best learning experience so far has been creating our Habits of Mind skits. I liked that we got to choose whether to present a skit or create a model. Some important skills that I needed to use in order to complete this activity were creativity to come up with an interesting idea for our skit; determination to keep going when things didn't work out the first time, and patience because I had to be patient when working with members of my group. Learning to work with others is pretty likely to happen a lot (in school and in your future job).    -@WritingMachine

My best learning experience this week was the Cards & Castles challenge. Some important skills that I needed to use in order to complete this activity were perseverance because we needed to keep trying no matter how hard it was to make our towers; creativity and teamwork because the challenges were really hard and we had to work together to keep creating structures that were different than the others. Practicing and developing these skills is important because in the real world and in our future jobs, we will have to work together and communicate in different ways with other people.    - @thesciencegeek     

My best learning experience so far has been the dialogical interviews. Getting to know each other, especially my partner, was helpful (and funny). Some important learning skills that I needed to use in order to complete this activity were listening closely to learn as much as I could about my partner and collecting data; and patience while I would wait for my partner to finish speaking. This experience was helpful because in the real world, we will need to collect data and actively listen to others.   - @seafoam-da-seawing