Listening: A Framework for Teaching Across Differences

How can new and experienced teachers rethink their teaching and learn to embrace and grow from the diversity they encounter among their students? Rather than preparing teachers to follow prescriptions or blueprints, Katherine Schultz suggests that they be given the tools and the opportunity to attend and respond to the students they teach. In this book, she offers a conceptual framework for “deep listening,” illustrating how successful teachers listen for the particularities of each student, listen for the rhythm and balance of the whole class, listen for the broader contexts of their students’ lives, and listen for silence and acts of silencing. Listening in this manner brings together knowledge of individual students, an understanding of a student’s place within the classroom and community, and mastery of subject matter and pedagogy. Featuring the perspectives of students and teachers, this volume proposes new ways of thinking about teaching across all grade levels and subject areas, addressing many of the challenges posed by the current climate of high-stakes testing and standardization.

“Teaching requires careful listening. . . . If you want to learn to listen in order to teach really well, and to find your teaching interesting from one year to the next, pay close attention to how these teachers do their daily work.”

—From the Foreword by Frederick Erickson

“This is a beautifully crafted, wise, humane book that counters the rush to standards and test-taking. In place of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy that constricts learning, Schultz advocates convincingly for a nuanced approach based on ‘listening.’ This is a book every educator from kindergarten through graduate school should read.”
—Michael B. Katz, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania