Learning to Listen: Cultivating Pre-Service Teachers’ Attunement to Student Thinking

ABSTRACT

Reform efforts in science and mathematics education highlight students’ experiences and sensemaking repertoires as valuable resources for instruction. Yet, there is much to learn about how to cultivate teachers’ capacity for eliciting, understanding, and responding to students’ contributions. We argue that the first step of this cultivation is teachers’ learning to listen: to attune and attend to the novel ways that students make sense of scientific phenomena and the natural world. While this notion of listening as critical to teaching is intuitive, the work behind it can be challenging. As such, this study explores promises and tensions of learning to listen through the journey of one pre-service teacher and examines her shifting views on teaching as related to her reflective practice around the work of listening. Focusing on listening as a core tenet of teaching, we discuss implications for teacher education to center listening as an instructional target for teacher learning in science and mathematics education.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning to listen
• reflective practice
• responsive teaching
• STEM education
• STEM teacher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Aspects of this work were supported by the National Science Foundation Division of Research on Learning DRL 1844453