Listening with Understanding

Listening with Understanding & Empathy

In the English and Reading classroom, students engage is discussions that enhance learning or to help them to apply what they have learned to new content. Teaching the students to listen to others with understanding and empathy helps them monitor their own thoughts, while attending to the speakers words. In doing this, students can understand each others point of view and create meaningful dialogue. These artifacts outline the students introduction to this habit of mind and shows student growth through reinforcement activities.

Annotated Lesson Plan

Annotated

The lesson plan offers an introduction and explicit instruction to the Listening with Understanding and Empathy habit of mind. The lesson includes activities that examine the student ability to have empathy. Alongside the lesson plan, annotations of the lesson components are added to provide detailed reasoning of how the lesson teaches this habit of mind. Each annotation demonstrates how practicing the habit can grow a students mindset to listen and understand with empathy. The lesson begins with the Empathy Quiz to gauge student empathy levels, to the students creating listening rules, to engaging in reinforcement activities that develop student mindset growth.

Empathy Quotient Quiz

Empathy

Pictured below is the Empathy Quotient Quiz. This student taken quiz surveys the students on their personal levels of empathy. The quiz focuses around two questions and has the students rate themselves. This quiz is offered to help the students reflect on their own feelings and to be more aware of their ability to listen and understand others.

Good Listening Rules

Good Listenin Rules

As part of the annotated lesson plan above, the students developed good listening rules. As a class, the students created these rules to use when doing partner and group discussions as a protocol for class activities. In the picture, the student has written the class listening rules to prepare for the listening activity from the lesson. Developing listening rules holds the students accountable during discussions.

Student discusses the importance of rule #2.

Listening Partner Activity

To get the students to apply good listening skills, having them practice using the habit of mind helps them to correct their own errors which develops a sense of empathy. Pictured below is the listening activity expectations. The footage that follows show the students engaging in the partner activity.

Students participating in listening activity.

Empathy Reflection

Student Empathy Reflections

It is important to give the students multiple opportunities to reflect so that they can be more aware of their habits and do the work to growth. The first example is a reflection question the students answered at the beginning of the lesson. Each of the student examples were recorded at the beginning and the end of the lesson to see if the students learned from the lesson and possibly developed the habit to listen and understand with empathy.

Listening Stems

Reinforcement: Discussion/Listening Stems

The discussion/listening stems shown below guide the students through the listening activity and any discussion moving forward. These stems encourage a positive dialogue that helps them to be empathetic to the speaker or listener. Giving the student the stems provides them with the practice of listening skills at any point of a lesson or discussion of a topic. Since learning how to use the listening stems, student are reminded to use them daily.

Reinforcement: 3PEE Writing Strategy

3PEE

To ensure that the students understand the habit of mind taught, reinforcement activities are needed for the students to practice making it a habit. These activities show that the student has internalized the trait and applied it in their daily routines. Listening with Understanding and Empathy is a habit of mind that can be reinforced in discussion and writing questions. To get the students to empathize with the characters in Hunger Games, using the 3 PEE paragraph strategy helps to organize the students thought process.

Below are the 3PEE paragraphs written by two students. Both of the paragraphs demonstrate the students development and growth of the habit of mind. In both paragraphs, the students understand the feelings of the characters from their point of view. Not only did they read and demonstrate understanding, they understood the actions of the character and showed how it made them feel individually.

Reinforcement: Question of the Day

As a daily warm up activity, the students are asked a question that requires them to activate background knowledge. I use the question of the day to either review previous discussed content, or to get the students to think critically about topics they are about to engage in. Since teaching the students about listening and understanding with empathy, incorporating questions that require students to have empathy, reinforces the habit and prepares them to discuss.

Teacher Reflection

I want to create a classroom where students are comfortable to share and discuss, and though there is a level of respect for me as a teacher, I want the students to emphasize with their peers and listen to each other. Explicitly teaching the students to listen with understanding and empathy helps them to learn from each other. When the students learn from each other, they develop a sense of team. When teaching this lesson, I wanted my students to identify that they haven’t developed listening with empathy and it has an impact on our class. The reinforcement writing strategy is a quick way to guide the students back to this habit of mind. When students are able to use the content taught in any lesson and apply the habit of mind, they are showing personal development of the habit as well. These activities allow the students to get the most our of the classroom, and with further reinforcement, they can continue using this habit to problem solve on their own.

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Vanessa M. Johnson