Learning Through Listening Video Introduction
David Rose, Ed.D., Chief Scientist, Cognition & Learning, CAST
New digital technologies are radically transforming what we mean by literacy in our culture. Old definitions of what it meant to be literate or educated are changing with these new technologies. In particular, these new technologies are bringing back listening to the center of what it means to teach and learn.
In today’s classrooms listening offers new ways to engage students. Considering at first, students for whom traditional print technologies have not worked well—like students with dyslexia or English language learners—learning through listening can be a critical way to gain entry to education at all. For other students, learning through listening engages them in the culture of their day through the technologies, the players, the audio media that they are used to in their widespread culture so education no longer looks backward and old but it feels part of preparing them for their future. Learning through listening is important then both for students who struggle in traditional technologies and for students who want to prepare for the kinds of technologies they'll really use.
Listening to learn requires active listening—processing, engaged, constructive listening—and many students do not know how to do that. So the first thing we have to do is teach them how to listen: active listening and listening through which they can learn. This website is all about teaching students to listen in that active, engaged, constructive way that they’ll be required to do to be literate in the world ahead.
There’s another advantage of emphasizing learning through listening and that is to take advantage of new media to respond to the great individual differences that students bring to the classroom. There are many ways to learn, and in many classrooms we have too narrow a set of ways to learn, expanding the ways in which we present information, the ways in which we ask kids to express themselves, and the ways in which we engage them allows more students to be successful. So merely by allowing listening to take its rightful place in the classroom, we expand the opportunities for more students to become engaged, more students to become successful. This is part of what we also call Universal Design for Learning—making sure that the lessons we give and the classrooms we make are prepared for the full range of students, and that means making sure that everybody’s engaged and everybody’s learning. Listening is a key part of that engagement.
To get a good deal more detail about learning through listening, I hope you’ll look at the multimedia paper that’s included here. This paper will go into how the brain really listens, how the brain picks up information, how the brain allows students to strategically listen for meaning and how the brain works to engage students. In addition, the paper will talk about how new technologies are changing, really, our view of what learning is because of the ways in which we can study the brain; secondly, how new technologies are changing the relationship between literacy and learning; and thirdly, how new technologies are changing what a literacy program and our classrooms should look like.
Once you’re finished with this multimedia paper, I hope you’ll explore all around the site, particularly the resources, the ideas, the tools that are available here for you to use. And I hope they’ll be helpful in making a classroom for you that works for more of your students and prepares all of your students for their future. Thank you for listening.