To help her kids practice listening, bradymyerov asks a few simple questions at the dinner table: 👂 How was your day? 👂 Share one good and bad thing that happened. 👂 What's one nice thing you did for someone else?
Monica Brady-Myerov's company"Listenwise" uses curated public radio and podcast excerpts to help students hone their listening skills. Monica Brady-MyerovThe former public radio reporter left journalism to start Listenwise, a company that uses curated radio and podcast pieces to build better listeners in K-12 classrooms. She writes about her work in the book"Back when Brady-Myerov worked at WBUR in Boston, she found out her third-grade daughter was struggling to learn to read.
Listenwise looks for public radio stories that align with what kids learn in the classroom and captivate listeners in the first few seconds through building empathy or providing a sensory experience, she says. “Imagine if you can take students there really quickly and then illustrate a point about science that you're learning in a classroom,” she says. “That's what makes listening so powerful in learning.”“Too many of our educators really have a professional blind spot when it comes to listening. They don't think that it needs to be taught. They focus more on the traditional skills, math and reading, and that's understandable,” she says.
To combat this, she says, teachers need tools to talk about the different kinds of listening: precise listening, descriptive listening and strategic listening. Once students feel in control of their ability to listen, they can learn that using this skill well can make remembering things, talking to friends and staying out of trouble with parents or teachers much easier.
Teachers tell Brady-Myerov that better listening skills help students absorb and retain material better as well as get excited about coursework in ways such as learning background information on a book by listening to an interview with the author, for example.