This week I was traveling in a city
where the prominent car dealership’s slogan is, “We hear you.” One of their billboards has a pair of Yoda
ears with the words, “Hear you we do!” in between. Their message is important and has relevance
for coaching. So, if you feel like
you're getting good at listening, go a little deeper and work on hearing
what teachers are saying to you.We listen with our ears, we hear with our hearts. Our hearts, together with our capacities for reasoning, create a more intense connection. Hearing implies a deeper level of understanding. It requires effort. Listening is passive, but hearing is an active verb.
A novice teacher told me about a disappointing experience she had with her coach. This young teacher was so excited about the potential of inquiry-based learning. She had learned about it during her teacher preparation, and it fit perfectly with her personal philosophy of teaching and learning. She shared her ideas with her coach, but the coach, although she listened, seemed not to hear. Her recommendations seemed to fit more with a conventional teaching style rather than supporting the teacher’s hopes for using inquiry in her classroom.
To hear, this coach would have had to first listen deeply to the teacher’s ideas, trying to understand both the purpose and the process. She might have asked questions to better identify what the teacher valued. If inquiry learning was unfamiliar to the coach, additional research may have been needed to really support this teacher’s efforts. The coach could ruminate a bit, contemplating how to put these ideas into practice, anticipating challenges and making suggestions for successfully implementing the approach.
As you work to enhance your coaching skills,
take listening one step further and work on your skills as a hearer
of teachers’ words. The better you are
at hearing, the better you will be heard.
Teachers' response might just be, “Hear you I do!”
This
week, you might want to take a look at:
Ideas
for engaging boy readers:
Education Week’s "Spotlight on Elementary Math" is a collection of articles on using research-based methods
to teach fractions, understanding the role of spatial skills, the role of
gender in math instruction, and building STEM skills. Download these articles at:
Click
on the blue titles in the spreadsheet to be launched into some amazing math
problems!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AjIqyKM9d7ZYdEhtR3BJMmdBWnM2YWxWYVM1UWowTEE&output=html
A
video to show students the connections to math in the everyday world:
A
podcast about student research:
That's it for this week. Happy Coaching!
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