Abstract
This chapter includes principles developed to help provide teachers with a structure for providing listening opportunities for students. The teaching and learning principles include modeling, motivation, purpose, active engagement, learner distinctions, social and emotional development, cognitive and metacognitive processes. One of the first aspects required for teachers to begin teaching mindful listening habits is to understand their own expectations for how they listen and how they expect students to listen. This chapter provides an overview for teachers to become more aware of their own listening and how to use read alouds as mentor texts to help provide learning experiences for students to practice learning and using mindful listening habits in authentic ways.
TopListening Standards
Within the teaching and learning curricular designs for today’s schools in the United States, listening is consistently included as an objective or goal. It is included in curriculum frameworks such as the Common Core (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) and within the Curriculum standards for states not currently using Common Core (Alabama, Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia, Alaska, Nebraska, Indiana, and South Carolina). It is often stated as “the students will listen to….”. The indication that children will listen clearly comes with the innate assumption that they know how - and we all know about the meaning of the word “assume,” right? As educators, we cannot continue to just assume that students enter our classrooms knowing how to be good listeners.