Kory Floyd:
Welcome to the Communication Corner, a McGraw Hill Podcast for the communication discipline. I'm your moderator for this session, Kory Floyd. Today I've brought together two guests to share some insights and strategies for teaching about listening skills. We'll start with some brief introductions, and then we'll dive right into today's topic. As I mentioned, I'm Kory Floyd, Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Development at Washington State University and McGraw Hill author. Before we get into our topic, I'd like to ask each of my guests to introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about their background. Let's begin with Graham Bodie from the University of Mississippi.
Graham Bodie:
Thanks, Kory. Graham Bodie, University of Mississippi. I'm in a department called Media and Communication, and when people ask me what I do for a living, I say that I teach people to listen, and then I pause and I wait for the awkward reaction. Or some people try to tell a joke like, "Huh?" And that's funny.
I try to do that both at the undergraduate level and graduate level as well as inside organizations. One of the things that I've found is that a lot of the things that we teach in communication studies are quite relevant for the workplace, and so I've done a lot of work on teaching what I call listening intelligence inside of teams and organizations. And that's a little bit about me.
Kory Floyd:
Thank you so much, Graham. I really appreciate it. Our next guest today is Narissra Punyanunt-Carter from Texas Tech University.
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Hello everyone, I am Narissra Punyanunt-Carter. Kory, you said that perfectly.
Kory Floyd:
Did I?
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Yes, absolutely. Usually people mess up my name and you said that perfectly, so yes, thank you. I teach interpersonal and relationships in the Department of Communication Studies here at Texas Tech University, and I'm a huge fan of Kory Floyd and Graham Bodie, so I'm excited to be here.
Kory Floyd:
Well, the feeling is mutual. We're so happy to have you here, both of you. Let's dive right into our topic today. I'm going to throw the first question to Graham, and that is, what are the reasons why it's so important to teach students listening skills?
Graham Bodie:
Yeah, listening has been called a variety of things like a Cinderella skill or the overlooked skill, and I think that's certainly true. Students from kindergarten through high school get a lot of instruction on stem as well as on reading. We know a lot about how to teach students how to read for synthesis and other kinds of outcomes, but listening doesn't really have a focus in that K through 12. Students come to college at a disadvantage, learning how to listen in a classroom setting, and then of course, listen in an interpersonal or a friendship dating relationship setting. Of course, we don't get a lot of instruction on that either. And the importance of that, of course, is because listening, feeling heard, feeling listened to is one of the key markers of relational satisfaction in a variety of relationships. There's a variety of outcomes that we can talk about as reasons why it's important to teach students listening skills. And I think among them are comprehension in the classroom and then learning to be a good friend, a good relational partner in more personal contexts.
Kory Floyd:
It's interesting how you frame that, Graham, that listening is a skill that really crosses domains of competence, if you will, that it's important in the school setting. You mentioned before, it's important in the workplace and also very important in our interpersonal interactions. Narissra, what sorts of reasons might you add to that list?
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Well, one of the quotes that I love and I share with students often is that a quote by Epictetus where he says we have one mouth and two ears, because we're supposed to listen twice as much as we speak. I do believe that listening is foundation to every communication skill that we have. Just like Graham said, where I think it's important for in the classroom, it affects our listening. It affects relationship building, conflict management. Employers often say that we want great communicators, but part of that is really listening, so I think it helps across the board.
Kory Floyd:
So Narissra, Graham was talking earlier about how often college students come into the university setting at a deficit in terms of listening skills because that isn't something that has been prioritized in their education up to that point. And I often hear people in our field say that even when they get to college, even if they're studying communication itself, listening skills are sometimes overlooked, or they're given short shrift in our communication curricula. Even those of us who are tasked with teaching about effective communication sometimes overlook listening as an important skill. Do you have any thoughts about why that is?
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Absolutely, yes. I think that listening is hard to see so it gets misfiled as participation instead of a teachable skill because in communication, we love artifacts. We talk about in public speaking like, oh, you have slides and outlines and speeches, but listening leaves fingerprints, not sculptures if we thought about it that way. So because our syllabi are oftentimes packed listening, we tend to think that there's a myth that listening is natural and we don't really pay that much attention to it. And so I think that's where the shift, we think that really it's just a skill problem. So that's what I believe.
Kory Floyd:
Even those of us in communication who should know better sometimes think of it that way.
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Right.
Kory Floyd:
Graham, what are your thoughts on why, even in communication curricula, we sometimes give listening skills less attention than they deserve?
Graham Bodie:
Yeah, it's a great question and a lot of the things that Narissra said I would absolutely agree with, and maybe double click on one of those where in our curricula, the focus a lot of times is on speaking well, and I think that comes from our rhetorical tradition and it comes from our culture. We have a saying in, at least the American culture, think before you speak. We don't have the same saying, think before you listen. In fact, after you hear that, you might shrug or give a curious look, what does that even mean? Think before you listen. And that goes back to something that Narissra said about, so we assume listening is natural, it's passive.
And this comes from scholarship as well. I mean, early definitions of listening were very much on the order of passivity. It wasn't until the 1970s or '80s when we had this idea that listening is an active process. And even the activity that we ascribe to listening then was very much cognitive in nature as opposed to what we understand now from work by Jan [inaudible 00:07:57] and others, that it's active in terms of listening listeners or narrators. The way that you act and react in a conversation has a direct impact on the nature of that conversation and the nature of that individual's ability to speak in certain ways. And so listening is much more complex and active than we give it credit for, and a lot of that is our fault as communication scholars for not paying attention to it. And I think part of that is because of our rich, rhetorical tradition focused primarily on speaking,
Kory Floyd:
We really do tend to prioritize the creation of a message, don't we? As opposed to the receipt of it, the processing of it, the understanding of it.
Graham Bodie:
Which is [inaudible 00:08:43] when you think about the idea of audience adaptation, which was.
Kory Floyd:
Oh, absolutely.
Graham Bodie:
There's all this rhetoric involved, right?
Kory Floyd:
That's right. You both have made allusion to the concept that we think of listening as a natural ability rather than a skill that needs to be taught and practiced and refined. And I think when we name that, recognize that it's a misunderstanding, it's a misconception about listening that we tend to have. Graham, I wonder, what do you think are some other major misconceptions about listening that even communication instructors and certainly communication students tend to fall victim to?
Graham Bodie:
Yeah, it is a great question, and not only because I ditched it a little 10 video series on my LinkedIn, so it's shameless plug for folks that want to look at the common myths of listening. One of the more common is that there's some kind of universal way in which everyone ought to listen to all people at all times in all contexts, in all points in history. And so just speaking well is strategic, and you have to adapt to a variety of contextual variables to get speaking right, there are also a variety of ways in which people ought to be listening, and there isn't one universal way so it's not shut your mouth, like what you learned in kindergarten, right?
Crisscross applesauce, eyes on me, turn on your listening ears. This idea that listening is simply obedience or simply comprehension. There's a lot of ways in which that steers us in the wrong direction of assuming that if I just learn this bucket list of things that I do with my body and with my eyes and so forth, that I'll be a good listener. And so I think that is the main misconception is that there's some universal set of skills that everybody ought to learn and do at all times.
Kory Floyd:
I have to say it's been a long time since I've heard the phrase crisscross applesauce. A long time. Narissra, what would you add to that list of major misconceptions?
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Right. To add to that, I think that people tend to think that silence is listening. Like I'm being silent so I am listening, or agreement equals listening, or I can multitask and listen at the same time. And it doesn't always prove that you're understanding what's going on. And sometimes people think that charisma is also, charisma gets attention and listening is not as seen as highly. So charisma beats listening because listening keeps trust, charisma gets attention, that kind of thing.
Kory Floyd:
You alluded to an interesting distinction there earlier in your answer between receiving information and understanding it. I'm hearing what you're saying as a part of listening versus I'm comprehending it or processing it or creating an ability to respond to it in an intelligent manner. And that to me also seems like a misconception about listening, that if we can hear what someone is saying, then by definition we are listening to it.
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Right.
Kory Floyd:
Would you both agree that that really is, hearing might be part of listening, but it's not the totality of what we're trying to teach students to do?
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Yes.
Kory Floyd:
Yeah.
Graham Bodie:
Yeah, it's a pretty easy dichotomy to say hearing is this physiological, listening is this more active, and I think there's some truth to that for sure. But of course, there's others who would say hearing, I need you to hear me. So I mean, we use it colloquially to suggest. So whatever language you're using, I do think there is some differentiation in the kinds of processes that are involved in this thing that we call listening. They're different from the physiology of hearing.
Kory Floyd:
Sure. That's really interesting. We do bring that misconception front and center when we say to somebody, "You're not hearing me," or, "I need you to hear me," we do use that term to mean something beyond just the physiological act of hearing. That's really interesting.
Graham Bodie:
I mean, even that idea that you're not listening to me, I mean, you get into an argument, right? "You're not listening to me."
"Yes, I am."
"No, you're not."
And you have this one idea about what listening is and what good listening comprises, and then I have this other idea about what good listening is and what good listening comprises, and what Narissra said earlier about agreement is very, very true. There's a recent study that showed people believe that someone who agrees with them is a better listener. I mean, we have all of these modeled concepts, terms, and outcomes, and we lump them all together and call someone a good listener when they might not necessarily be doing the things that as communication scholars, we want to attribute to that term specifically.
Kory Floyd:
Right. When in fact, agreement could follow a period of not listening actively to somebody at all.
Graham Bodie:
Exactly, 100%.
Kory Floyd:
Peripheral processing of the message that we're receiving. Narissra, I wonder if you have any thoughts on the kinds of barriers that instructors tend to experience when they are trying to teach listening skills? Both alluded to the idea that it's not necessarily an easy thing to teach in the same way that so many of us are trained to teach people how to organize a speech, for example. I wonder when instructors get to this unit that we might cover, say in an interpersonal or in an intro course, what sorts of barriers or challenges do you think instructors typically face?
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
That's a great question. I really feel like instructors have limited class time, and there's pressure to cover all sorts of concepts so listening gets pushed to the side in some classes. And then sometimes my interpersonal class, we have 200 students, so it's a large enrollment, and it makes listening hard to observe, to give feedback. It's difficult sometimes for me to give feedback in a large class like that on listening. It's sometimes class norms, especially in the American classrooms, we reward people who talk in class and participate, and so we don't really reward good listening. And then there's technology distractions where students are constantly on their phones or on their devices, and so they think they're paying attention, but they're really not. And so it creates a barrier when we're talking about the concept of listening.
I think also students have anxiety about, there's lots of anxiety, right? With students about being wrong, and it discourages them from asking questions and perception checking and so forth. I think those are some of the barriers. And the last thing I'll say is I think it's also cultural. We reward fast talkers rather than more accurate listeners. We encourage people like, "Oh, tell us what you think." And it goes back to what I was talking about before, that we really encourage people to discuss ideas rather than to listen and analyze ideas from others.
Kory Floyd:
Graham, I imagine you've, over the course of your career, spoken to a number of instructors about teaching listening skills. What sort of challenges do you run across in what they have to say?
Graham Bodie:
Yeah, I think in addition to that, the time and all of the distractions and so forth that Narissra mentioned, we feel like we have to teach X, Y, and Z, and listening isn't among those required courses, and so I try to jam it into part of a unit or whatever, and I don't really give it the time that it deserves. I think in addition to that, instructors are humans, and so we fall prey to myths as well, and so we believe things about listening that aren't true, and we teach from that standpoint. And then when the activity doesn't go well, then we either give up or move on to something else. And I think a final thing that I've seen primarily in organizations, but may also have relevance to teaching at the college level, that there are hidden consequences of poor listening that we don't necessarily attribute to listening.
One example is there's a series of studies that just came out that shows that people, your attention waxes and wanes during a conversation, which should be like, "No, duh," right? Well, there hasn't really been empirical evidence of the extent of that. And so this study demonstrates number one, we're distracted about 25% of the time or so in a conversation, our attention waxes and wanes, but people can't tell that it does. In other words, when I ask you, "Was that person a good listener, and do you think they were distracted?" I have trouble in a self-report format saying that they were a bad listener, they weren't paying attention, even though their non-listening has hidden consequences for my ability to tell a valid or a coherent story.
And so several studies show that even though people can't pick up on the fact that someone is distracted, the distraction actually causes all kinds of behavioral problems in me as a speaker as a function of that distraction, because it's a hidden problem, we don't know how to teach it because we don't even know it's a problem and so we go about assuming that listening is this active thing if we just teach people how to make eye contact and repeat things people say and ask good questions that we're making them good listeners.
Kory Floyd:
Right, which of course are part and parcel of active listening, all the things that you said.
Graham Bodie:
Yeah, it's not a bad place to start, but if that's all you do, then you're missing I think a lot of the nuance and how good listening is enacted in conversation.
Kory Floyd:
Well, and I also wonder, going back to your comment earlier, if one of the barriers to teaching listening skills is just that so many of us, even if we are communication experts, did not get good instruction in listening skills ourselves. So it's not something that we were trained properly to do as communicators, and therefore it's a more difficult thing for us to teach.
Graham Bodie:
And add to that that listening scholarship is not quite even still today, "mainstream" communication scholarship, very much like your work on affection exchange. It took a lot of work to make that front and center in people's minds, and so I think we still have some work to do to make listening the complexity of listening front and center in people's minds, scholars included.
Kory Floyd:
Sure. Well, let's think of the other side of the coin here then. We've talked about barriers and challenges for teaching listening skills. And Graham, let me start with you. What strategies have you found to actually be effective when we're trying to teach students to become active, engaged listeners? What works?
Graham Bodie:
Yeah, the myth format works. In other words, telling them, "Here's what we believe about listening, and here's the truth to that," right? Every myth, there's some truth, groundedness in that myth. So what's true about that myth? Where did it come from? And what are some negative consequences of fully believing that myth?
And then designing activities to show that. I do an activity, for instance, that tries to combat this myth that if you just really, really try really, really hard, you can fully comprehend and remember everything someone says. And I do an activity that generates false memories in people to get over the myth that we hear, just like psychology 101 teaches us we don't see the world in objective ways, and so why don't we believe that we don't hear the world in objective ways? And so I do a set of activities that sort of illustrates the fact that we all have these, we fill in the gaps as listeners, and sometimes that's to our advantage, and sometimes that's to our disadvantage.
Kory Floyd:
That false memories, that's really interesting. We do often believe that we have heard something that in fact, we didn't hear. Is that what you're alluding to?
Graham Bodie:
Yes. We believe that a word was in a list when it wasn't, or we believe that someone was late to work because three or four sentences suggested that they were anxious about something but I never said that it was because of late to work or whatever, so yes.
Kory Floyd:
So we fill in those details in our brains, though it's not actually something that we've heard.
Graham Bodie:
Yep.
Kory Floyd:
Yeah. Narissra, when you teach listening skills, what sorts of strategies have you found to be most effective?
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Talking about that recent activity that y'all were just mentioning. I do the same thing with the sleep. There's all these words that are associated with sleep like dream and night, and then the students think that I said sleep, but I didn't say it. And so we do that activity, and I think that's really fun because we talk about how we sometimes assume people are communicating in such a way to us when they're really not. Maybe their intention is completely different, and so I think that works. I also, in smaller classes will have one person be the listener in chief, if you will. And so that student will track themes, terms, anything that we talked about in class. And then at the very end of class, they'll do a 60-second synopsis synthesis of what was most important, what we talked about in class. And it's really interesting because each day it's a different student, and so we're listening again to what we talked about in class, and so that's been fun and effective.
And then the other thing that I'll talk about is I'll get a pen or a marker, whatever, and if we're doing something that's discussion based, I'll make sure that anyone who has the pen or marker, whatever has to accurately paraphrase the last speaker. It may be me, I might be talking about something, and then I'll give the pen marker to somebody and then they have to paraphrase, and then it moves on. And then we keep on continuing until we've actually listened to everyone in class, and so that is an eye-opener for students, because they're not always perceptive about paraphrasing.
Kory Floyd:
That's such an interesting observation. Paraphrasing seems to me to be one of the more concrete aspects of teaching listening that we can focus on. If I say something to a student and then I ask that student to paraphrase, one of the things I'm asking the student to do is to give me, as the speaker the opportunity either to accept and affirm the paraphrase as they've given it to me or to correct it. And so often I think with listening, and I imagine you would both agree with this, we don't ever clarify with the source of the message whether we have actually understood it properly. We simply assume that if we paid attention, and done some manner of processing in our own minds, that we have understood that message in an accurate way. And paraphrasing, to go back to Graham's point earlier that we co-construct a conversation, paraphrasing seems to be one of those elements that gives a listener the opportunity to have their understanding modified or corrected if actually they're paraphrasing in an inaccurate manner.
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Absolutely.
Kory Floyd:
Yeah. Narissra, you made a point earlier that perhaps one of the reasons that listening is difficult to teach, and perhaps one of the reasons why we don't give it its due is that it's difficult to assess. It's not the same as assessing a speech or making an evaluation of a paper. I wonder if you have thoughts on what we as instructors might do to address that, in particular, what kinds of classroom activities that instructors might use, not only to teach the skills themselves, but to do some manner of assessment or evaluation. How can we approach that in a more proactive way?
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
One thing I also do is a question quality index where at the end of class, at the end of my lecture, I'll have all students submit two questions after a discussion. One has to be a clarifying question, more information on X topic, XYZ, whatever. And then the second question has to advance. So that's where I'm really getting like, oh, this is where you've understood what we've said, but how does it advance what? So then I'm trying to look at is it relevant to the topic, how depth, the depth in which they understand the concept and so forth. I find that really effective.
And then sometimes I'll do similar to what Graham was talking about earlier, like false news, but it's the misquote game where I intentionally will miss summarize the key point that I just talked about, and I want to see if students correct me with evidence. It's playful, but it also trains them to have the courage to check for accuracy because we live in such an AI, fake news kind of world now. I think it helps them. Those are some activities that I use to assess competence with listening.
Kory Floyd:
That latter one reminds me of the skills that we try to teach relevant to critical listening.
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Right.
Kory Floyd:
Where we're listening to say, evaluate the accuracy or the value of something that we are hearing as opposed to simply listening to understand it or to appreciate it. Graham, what sort of activities might you recommend to instructors for, again, not just teaching the skills, but assessing the competence of students who are learning them?
Graham Bodie:
Yeah, that assessment is, I mean, it's tricky. Very much like communication, competence, others have defined listening competence in this tripartite way, motivation to do the thing, the cognition or the internal processing, and then the behavior. And I think it's easy to assess motivation. You just ask students, there's a variety of scales, whether it's self-perceived or listening competence scale. There's active empathic listening scale. There's a variety of scales that I really interpret as scales that assess students' willingness to, or would they think that these things are important to do.
And then cognition is a little bit trickier. Most of the scales that are out there, the instruments that are out there are basically 40 non-correlated multiple choice questions that are primarily about comprehension. So what are you trying to measure there? Are you trying to measure understanding of just, did they hear the words correctly? Are you trying to assess some kind of speech act recognition or what are you trying to assess there? And so the behavior is also, as Narissra was pointing out, are they able to ask certain kinds of questions, or are they able to paraphrase in ways that are more accurate as opposed to less accurate?
Or do they see the need to do those behaviors? In other words, if you're in a conversation with them and you say something that ought to be confusing, for instance, do they stop you and do they say, "Here's what I understand. Can you help me make sure that that's correct?"
Are they engaging in those kinds of behaviors? I think just to double click on what Narissra said is put them in these kinds of roles. I love that idea of a chief, I don't know what you called it, a chief listening officer or something like that for the classroom. I think that's great, and to assign that role around and see how students are interpreting that role and what that means in terms of their understanding of what listening is and what it accomplishes. That sounds like a really good activity, I think.
Kory Floyd:
Narissra, do students respond positively to that?
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Yes. Some people, it makes them super, it gives them a lot of anxiety sometimes. But I feel like since they know that everybody has to do it once, I think some people embrace it, and some people they might struggle through it, but they have their peers to help them as like, "Hey, we also talked about this. You might mention that." And so I think that creating a supportive classroom also helps with that.
Kory Floyd:
Oh, sure, yeah, and knowing that they're all in the same boat.
Graham Bodie:
And if you have time to do so, if you have a listening class, for instance, I've found journaling on a regular basis, students just to journal about miscommunication mishaps in their life and what they thought the reason for that was, and the extent to which they take responsibility for part of that. Just getting them to just be aware of listening in their lives. That might be the first time they ever had that opportunity. Very much like when you assign them to be the chief listening officer of the class, it's probably the first time they've ever even heard that term. Just to be aware that this is something that's important enough to assign a label to.
Kory Floyd:
Graham, when you do that, I wonder how engaged do you find that your students are with their journaling and their reflection?
Graham Bodie:
Yeah, I mean, when you make it part of the grade, of course, students are going to do it for the sake of the grade, or at least some of them will. But the last time I taught an undergraduate class, and I had them do that, the reflection activity. I had them journal two or three times a week, and then every couple of weeks they would turn in a 250 to 500 word reflection about those journals. And they became more and more like, "Hey, I can actually see the importance of this. I had a conversation with my dad, and it was better than ever because I was able to explain to him that when he listens to me in this way, it's not what I need, but I need him to do this. And he changed."
Or they themselves figured out that they weren't listening in ways that were conducive to relationship development with their friend or their romantic partner, and that helped them be a better relational partner. I've seen 50 to 60-year-old men who didn't even graduate high school come to me crying because for the first time, they had a real conversation with their wife that they have been married to for 20 or 30 years, and this is the first time that they've actually had a real conversation because they sat down to actually pay attention to them.
I've seen it change lives. I've seen it more often change lives in adult learners than college student learners. But I still do get that occasional email 10 years after where student's like, "By the way, I just wanted to let you know that I'm actually using what you taught me 10 years ago."
Kory Floyd:
Well, and I think it's a reflection of how we started this conversation, which is the observation that those skills really cut across almost all domains in our lives that are important. That's got to feel so gratifying when you get that kind of feedback from students.
One final question, and let's see. I'll throw this out to Graham first and then Narissra following. And I think this is a really, it's such a timely question, which is how listening instruction can be adapted effectively to digital environments. So many of us, even post pandemic, are still teaching in online classes or in mediated environments. The three of us, in fact, right this very minute are talking over Zoom. And so it has become so much more commonplace when we find ourselves interacting with students in those kinds of mediated ways. Do you have any thoughts on how instructors can adapt our listening instruction in an effective manner for those kinds of digital environments? Graham, let's begin with you.
Graham Bodie:
Yeah. I just taught an online class. I think it was two summers ago, organizational listening, and it was fully online, and it was a graduate level course. I found myself adapting more because it was a truncated four weeks as opposed to 16 weeks I did, because it necessarily was online. I think the material, because it was more of a theory kind of class where they were learning this idea that organizations listen and how organizations are perceived as listeners was much more of a, you could do that online or in person, but in terms of teaching listening skills through mediated environments, I think it's a nice way to illustrate that what it means to listen well shifts as a function of the context. And so in the digital context, whether or not you have synchronous visual and audio communication and so forth, that those contextual variables change or shift the degree to which this or that behavior, this or that attitude, this or that cognitive process is fully relevant to the listening process.
There's starting to be some research on that, particularly around Zoom, about the differences in a Zoom environment. But we've always known that the telephone is different. And by telephone, I don't mean texting. I mean talking to somebody on the telephone, that the telephone is different for a variety of reasons in terms of listening. I'm not sure why it surprises us that all of a sudden Zoom causes a contextual head scratcher in terms of how we need to adjust and adapt. But I do think I view it as a challenge worth investigating rather than a barrier to get over and say, "Well, we can't teach this in the online space. Let's only do this in person." I do think there are adaptations, but those adaptations, I think just illustrate the fact that listening well is contextual.
Kory Floyd:
Right. Yeah, that's a good observation that it's just changing, say the channels and the modalities that we have access to, but it's not necessarily cutting off or even reducing our ability to teach listening effectively. Narissra, what has been your experience?
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
Yes, I agree with everything that Graham said. I also have in an online environment, if it is synchronous, I'll have a chat listener who will, that I assign each time that we meet, and occasionally they'll surface up and they'll have to type something into the chat where it's like themes or unanswered questions that we as a class have to do. Sometimes I'll have students afterwards on a chat, go through the transcript and they'll have to put little exclamation points with insights that they thought was interesting. They'll put question marks for any clarifications that I might need to go over, and then they'll put little arrows or stars on any applications in which they thought, "Oh, wow, this can totally apply to my life."
And then they'll submit that as a screenshot or whatever, as a PDF, and then they'll mark through it, and then they'll send that to me so that I'm aware that they're actually keeping up with what I'm talking about. Especially in synchronous classrooms, sometimes I'll have breakouts where I'll have a listener, a speaker, and then I have a verifier. The verifier has to confirm that the listener has correctly paraphrased what the speaker said before the group can move on to what else we are talking about in the class.
Kory Floyd:
That's really interesting.
Narissra Punyanunt-Carter:
That's a fun thing too, so those are some things that I use in digital spaces.
Kory Floyd:
Yeah. One thing I hear both of you saying is that you adapt to the modality itself and try to use its strengths to focus on teaching and assessing listening rather than thinking, "Well, this is a modality that restricts my ability to listen or restricts my ability to teach and assess listening skills," and throwing my hands up in the air and saying, "Well, I guess I'm not going to pursue that," you're really being active and mindful about what are the affordances of this digital environment? How can I use that to my advantage as an instructor? I think that's really so valuable.
Narissra and Graham, I just want to thank you both so much for your time today, for your expertise, for your willingness to share with all of us about teaching and assessing listening, and the reasons why it's so important. For those of you who are listening to this podcast, I want to thank you for joining us today. We really hope that you have learned something new that might help you teach valuable listening skills to your own students. We really appreciate you being with us, and please tune in for the next episode of Communication Corner.
