Listen Wise

Teach Students to Be Better Listeners

Monica Brady-Myerov

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119755524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Enseignement des langues

Listen Wise

Listening skills form part of the foundation of any successful student's repertoire of abilities. Crucial to academic performance and success throughout life, attentive listening can transform students' ability to absorb and understand information quickly and efficiently.

In Listen Wise: Teach Students to Be Better Listeners, journalist, entrepreneur, and author Monica Brady-Myerov delivers an insightful and practical examination of how to build powerful listening skills in K-12 students. The book incorporates the Lexile Framework for Listening and explains why it is revolutionizing the field of listening and contributing to a surging recognition of its importance in the academic curriculum. It also includes firsthand classroom stories and incisive teacher viewpoints that highlight effective strategies to teach critical listening skills.

You'll discover real-world examples and modern, research-based advice on how to assist young people in improving their listening abilities and overall academic performance. You'll also find personal anecdotes from the accomplished and experienced author alongside accessible excerpts from the latest neuroscience research covering listening and auditory learning.

Listen Wise explains why listening skills in students are crucial to improving reading skills, especially amongst those students still learning English. The book is a critical resource that demonstrates why listening is the missing piece of the literary puzzle and shows educators exactly what they can do to support students in the development of this key skill.

Perfect for K-12 teachers looking for effective new ways to understand their students and how they learn, Listen Wise will also earn a place in the libraries of college and master's level students in education programs readying themselves for a career in teaching

Chapter 1
My Love of Audio Storytelling

We can hear before we are born, but listening can take decades to develop, practice, and perfect. It took me 20 years to become an expert listener. A professional listener. And I learned that listening is a gift we can share with others.

My passion for listening began when I got my first tape recorder for Christmas (Figure 1.1). Santa delivered my Christmas wish—a bright red Panasonic cassette tape recorder. This was the 1970s, so it was shiny and rounded on the edges. It had an easy carry handle that slid up, which told me audio was meant to be portable. It had a cheap plug-in microphone, which told me I should be listening to and recording others. And it ran on batteries so I could go anywhere I wanted to capture sound. It's really one of the only gifts I remember getting as a child. I instantly fell in love with recording sound.

Figure 1.1 My first tape recorder.

Source: Monica Brady-Myerov's family photo.

My recording didn't go far beyond my family. I mostly cornered my sisters and interviewed them. I conducted a hard-hitting investigative interview with my two-year-old sister about the neighbor's dog. I thought I was a reporter. I wanted to be the 60 Minutes leading female journalist of the time, Barbara Walters. I would also secretly place the recorder under the dining room table to capture the “adult” conversation. Even at that age, I knew listening was a way to learn something new—maybe even something adults wouldn't tell me. I only have one remaining cassette tape from this time, which I've now preserved digitally.

My love of sound and journalism started to come together a few years after I got that tape recorder for Christmas. Our family would take long drives in the summer to visit relatives in Massachusetts. It took 14 hours to drive from Kentucky to Massachusetts. Being in a car with five kids was tedious for everyone, especially my dad, who was always the driver.

My father loved news and would always play CBS news at the top of the hour on the radio. But there were very few all-news stations at that time. And there was bad reception when you were driving through the mountains of West Virginia. That means there were long stretches in between the top of the hour news bulletins and he wanted to hear more news. So he brought along his newspapers. As a daily subscriber to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, there was plenty of news to read. But how to hear it?

My father saw a creative solution. He told his kids that anyone who wanted to read the newspaper to him while he drove got to sit in the front seat between him and my mother. This was back when the front seat was a bench that could fit three people. Today it seems dangerous.

I saw my opportunity to escape the chaos in the back seat with my three sisters and one brother. I was the second oldest, and the only volunteer. My older sister was a bookworm and preferred reading silently to block out the noise.

I sat unbelted in between my mom and dad in the front of our station wagon and read the newspaper out loud. My dad would glance over from the road and poke his finger at the next story he wanted me to read to him. I learned how to follow a jump in a newspaper story and read with some interest and emotion. Looking back on this experience with the knowledge I now have of how hearing words and content strengthen reading and learning, I am sure these experiences had a huge impact on my learning. I know they influenced my career choice. I wanted to be an audio journalist.

But I also learned that at any age, reading to someone is a gift of sharing, love, and intimacy. Hearing another human's voice, expressing words in their own unique way makes you feel closer. You could be a kindergarten teacher sharing a picture book at circle time or a middle school teacher sharing Harry Potter chapter by chapter. Do not underestimate the impact of your voice on your students and their ability to listen.

WHAT AUDIO JOURNALISM TAUGHT ME ABOUT LISTENING

By the time I entered college, I knew I wanted to work in audio journalism. My love of audio was deep and abiding. Working in the news department at the Brown University college radio station was an obvious choice; it gave me the training and practice I needed to become a reporter, along with an official reason to hear and share people's stories. I considered my role as a reporter to be that of a teacher. My reports taught my listeners something about the news of the day.

My college station was a unique commercial rock station run by students. It meant the news department of 95.5 WBRU in Providence, Rhode Island did not cover college campus events. We covered local and national news including murder trials, corruption, and politics. I even had the budget to take a team of reporters to cover both the Republican and Democratic conventions in 1988.

At the heart of all the stories I covered and what I was learning about audio is that hearing people's stories is powerful.

THE INTIMACY OF AUDIO

What captivates me about audio is the intimacy of the medium. Listeners can hear emotions first-hand. Anger, joy, concern, desperation, and regret. They all sound distinct in someone's voice. You can hear someone struggling not to cry, and then their voice cracks and they break down into tears. You can hear the shock, relief, and joy of someone receiving good news they didn't expect to get. Imagine right now what these emotions sound like. Maybe you are imagining your mother telling you a dear relative passed away. Or your best friend telling you she just got engaged.

Listening to audio sharpens your ears and senses and transports you into the story. I can type “sigh,” and you can imagine what it sounds like. But hearing someone mourning the loss of their loved one and saying “I am going to miss them so much” and then deeply, audibly sigh, can't be fully captured in print.

Listening to audio stories can help to engage students in stories, in literacy, and in learning. You may know this from watching kids, mouths agape, listening to you read aloud, voicing each character with expression, adding drama to your delivery to create suspense. You may not realize how much more you can do to incorporate audio into your teaching with similar effect.

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Class Activity: Listening to Emotion

In the stories below, your students will be able to hear the emotion. You might spark reflective conversation after listening to the story together with some general follow-up questions: How do you think the person in the story feels? What emotions do you think that person is feeling by listening to the tone of their voice? What do pauses sometimes tell you about how a person is feeling? Do you think your voice sounds different whether you are happy or sad?

Elementary School Students: The story “50 Years After She Was Struck By Lightning, Reconnecting With The Girl Who Saved Her” is a conversation between two older women who have an emotional reunion. [1]

Middle/High School Students: The story “Trying Not To Break Down—A Homeless Teen Navigates Middle School” is full of emotion from a boy who is homeless and working hard to succeed in school and life. [2]

The story “How a Stuffed Toy Monkey Reunited a Holocaust Survivor with Relatives” is a moving conversation between a father and son about what really happened to his family during the Holocaust. [3]

The audio and additional teaching resources can be found at https://listenwise.com/book.

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It's hard to get the same kind of intimate connection through just the written word. In fact, it might take a paragraph to explain in detail the emotion someone expressed in one word through their voice. And it will never capture what it sounded like to actually be there.

Previously, I studied abroad in Kenya and lived in Nairobi for the summer working as an intern for Reuters, a leading international wire service. As an intern, I mostly organized files and typed up stories from reporters calling in from the field. But one day, Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun, now a saint, who worked with the poor came to Nairobi to meet with city officials to ask them to give her mission free municipal water. Reuters sent me to cover her visit to the Missionary of Charity Order in a heavily populated poor area of the city. Armed with my notebook only, because Reuters didn't have an audio service (or a podcast), I set out. Even though I didn't record Mother Teresa, I will never forget her calm, quiet, soothing voice amid the chaos of the noisy neighborhood. She was a petite woman, dressed as always in her white with blue-striped nun's habit. Physically she didn't command attention. But her sure, strong voice did.

After graduating, I returned to Nairobi, Kenya, this time as an audio journalist.

My time as a freelancer in Kenya was a launch pad into audio storytelling as I covered East Africa for Voice of America and other shortwave stations. It was during a tumultuous time in Kenya's history under a fairly new democratic government. Kenya was a British colony until it became fully independent in 1963. In 1982, the government amended the constitution, making Kenya officially a one-party state. By the time I arrived and started reporting in 1989, the government was cracking down on budding political opposition to the autocratic President Daniel arap Moi. The president had announced there would be multiparty elections but he and his gove...