Listening, Conversations & the Learning Experience
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This paper is a discussion of the importance of listening and using conversations as part of the learning experience. It uses Mary McCaslin and Thomas L. Good's text, Listening in Classrooms, as the primary reference and considers their principal thesis: that listening helps facilitate both the formal and the informal learning process and that the student-teacher relationship, built and enhanced through conversation and interchange, is the key to an effective classroom experience. The book attempts to provide specific techniques to build these relationships through listening, rather than simply suggesting that teachers hear what their students are saying. This exchange of communications, while apparently simple, is actually quite complex and requires a sophisticated degree of skill in order to be used well. Effective listening requires the teacher to become actively involved in the process, as a co-regulator and a coparticipant, consciously influencing both the curricular content and the social and psychological lessons being administered, while also learning and continuing to grow as well. McCaslin and Good write, "Relationships, in our view, are the stuff of classrooms; relationships bond the aspirations with the realizations of schooling." While learning is certainly possible outside of the classroom setting, the one-to-one connection between teacher and student, as well as the interactions among students, is a critical aspect of learning within classroom walls.
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lems and issues that may arise, and select possible 'back-up' strategies to address them." Whatever the specific goals, the general goal is to learn from the exchange, and this requires the interviewer to listen more than to talk.
The authors also devote a chapter to listening to and understanding families, since they are one of the most important contexts for students. They caution, "Educators tend to unidimensionalize families; they also unidimensionalize what they want from them." Listening to and involving families in the classroom process is more a question of understanding the influences that home life have on the individual student than being able to change that environment: "Teachers cannot 'fix' the family or the conditions that encompass it." Nevertheless, the ability to establish effective conversations with families, especially conversations that focus on actively listening to the spoken and unspoken messages being communicated, is essential to building a useful relationship with the individual student. McCaslin and Good write, "We believe that teachers can do much to create a supportive environment within which students thrive and their families feel welcomed."
Teachers do not deal only with students in o
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Athanasios Papaioannou, Ellie Lago-Delello, Bingham Moore, William Bursuck, Len McMillan, Listening Classrooms, Educational Association, Goldwater Nutt, Lin Grensing-Pophal, James McLeskey, informal curriculum, unspoken messages, subject matter, active listening, teacher student, mccaslin write, classroom experience, spoken unspoken, individual student, formal informal, relationship teacher student, listening spoken unspoken, spoken unspoken messages,
Approximate Word count = 3955
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)
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