by Bethanie Hansen | Podcast, Students, Teaching Online
This content first appeared on APUEdge.Com.
Podcast with Dr. Bethanie L. Hansen, Associate Dean (Interim), School of Arts, Humanities and Education
Listening is both a simple and complex skill. In this episode, APU’s Dr. Bethanie Hansen discusses the importance of “listening” in the online classroom, even when classes are delivered asynchronously. Learn about four types of listening as well as three tools to help online educators effectively respond to students.
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Bethanie Hansen: This podcast is for educators, academics and parents, who know that online teaching can be challenging, but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun! Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen. And I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.
Hello, I’m Bethanie Hansen, and I help online educators through this Online Teaching Lounge podcast. We’re going to hear something about listening today, and how listening is both simple and complex. It is a skill that can serve us incredibly well in life, generally, and, it’s essential to our work as online educators.
We find the job of teaching online to be both simple and complex. There are so many areas that we can explore, expand, refine, and improve.
The simplicity of teaching online means that we can see this experience as simpler than teaching a live, face-to-face class. You basically put content into the LMS, guide students through it, and evaluate their progress. And viewed in its simplicity, we might wonder what can make it a better, richer, a better experience for everyone. And we might ask how we can assure that it is a quality experience. Or, in other words, what makes it worth doing?
The complexity of teaching online means that we can get lost in the many things to do to assure that it is a transformative experience for students. We have frameworks to help us develop curriculum and content. We have accessibility measures that must be followed to help all learners access the content appropriately for their needs. We have various media tactics, including text, picture, video, audio, and interactive forms. We have models of interaction and engagement throughout the learning journey. We have types of instructor presence and strategies to achieve these aspects. And there are quality checks we can use through the OLC Scorecard, or the Quality Matters rubric, or something else. If you’re deeply involved in all of these things I’ve mentioned, you know online education can be rich and quality-focused, designed to promote the growth and transformation of our students from every angle.
In all of its simplicity and complexity, because it is done online, listening is not a topic that often comes up. After all, if online education is asynchronous, there is no live talking happening. But there is asynchronous talking of all kinds. This includes text, timing, tone, perspective, and assumptions. And if there is all of this “talking” going on, there must also be listening.
As an online educator, how do you focus on listening in the online space? How do you interpret what you hear? And how do you respond?
Today, I’m sharing four types of listening and three tools to respond to what you hear. These types of listening are:
- listen for social connection
- listen for big ideas and concepts
- listen for facts and authority and
- listen for application and relevance
When listening in each of these four ways, some helpful responding tools include acknowledging, validating, and affirming. Beyond these strategies, most educators will naturally add questioning, challenging, building their students’ ideas, and redirecting when needed.
Listen for Social Connection
Building social connection is one way of listening to others. If you’ve ever been in a meeting in which someone was smiling and nodding at the speaker the whole time, it’s possible that his person was listening for social connection. A person listening in this way is not concerned about what is being communicated. Instead, they are participating in the social experience of building relationships by listening to connect with others.
Listening in this way means that I might be trying to see the person behind the speaker or writer. I’m primarily concerned with who they are and how I might understand them as a human being. I might engage in ways that help me build a bridge with the other person and put aside any other agenda to get fully present in the social space. If I listen to build social connection, my primary concern is to build empathy.
As an online educator, social presence is part of our community of inquiry model. To listen in this way, you might make special note of the background of your students. You might listen to their goals and degree plans. And you might also become aware of all that they bring into the online space, and what challenges they are facing as they participate in your class. With this kind of listening, you’re building relationships and becoming more informed and empathetic at the same time.
Listen for Big Ideas and Concepts
A conceptual listener is one who is most interested in the big idea behind a person’s words. It is the underlying theme or big-picture concept. The details might help paint this picture, but listening in this way doesn’t get lost in the details or require them to all be lined up in order perfectly.
Listening in this way means I might try seeing the big concept presented in a speaker or writer’s entire message. I’m primarily concerned with the idea itself and how I might observe their own understanding of this big idea. I might engage in ways that help me see more fully how the other person understands this big picture, rather than trying to impose my own understanding of that idea or concept. By putting aside my own ideas about it, I’m more able to hear how they see the concept.
As an online educator, cognitive presence is partly satisfied through the communication of big ideas and concepts. Listening in this way helps us learn how students construct knowledge for themselves and how they understand the concepts needed in any subject area. This kind of listening can help us detect where additional knowledge might be helpful or where we can support and redirect our students. With this kind of listening, you’re going to know when your students have sufficient understanding to play with theories and work to apply them.
Listen for Facts and Authority
A listener focused on facts and authority is most interested in the primary subject matter experts in the field, and the ways in which students use them in writing and speaking. Facts are just that—undeniable details. These might be core principles, dates, names, and other evidence or data. Authority means that well-developed source materials and quotes are integrated into the conversation, and where needed, these are cited appropriately.
Listening in this way means that I might hear what is said but wait for the supporting evidence or authority to back it up. I’m mainly concerned that the ideas are not just one person’s opinion, but something more well-known and research-based. I might engage in ways that provide this kind of information to others, showing by example. I might ask follow-up questions to prompt my students to share more about what they read and what they said and what they wrote.
As an online educator, facts and authority are another way in which we satisfy cognitive presence. Listening in this way helps us detect what students are actually learning specific to the subject matter and about engaging as academics and scholars themselves. And listening for these details, we can help mentor them to communicate on an academic level about ideas in the field that others believe are essential.
Listen for Application and Relevance
A listener focused on application and relevance is mostly interested in what can be done with the ideas being shared. The facts and authority might be important, and a solid discussion of the big picture concept. But more than that, it would be all about what we can do with these ideas.
Listening in this way means I might think, “This is nice, but why does it matter? What can we do with it in the real world?” I’m mainly concerned with how it can apply to me in my own life. Or how it can be implemented in the workplace. I might engage in ways that bring up various scenarios or what-if proposals. I might ask questions about making it real and trying it out.
As an online educator, especially with adult learners, applying the learning is a priority. Our students want to know how the ideas and details are relevant to them, and they want to be able to do something with the knowledge they have gained. Listening in this way helps us communicate on that same level with our students about areas they care most about. And this brings us full circle from learning social connection about who they are to the application of learning into more of who they are.
Respond by Acknowledging, Validating, and Affirming
Even when listening in different ways, it can be challenging to know how to respond. Three easy responses that help online students feel seen, heard, and understood can be learned and practiced and chances are, you’re already doing them.
Acknowledging means that we let others know they were heard. In the online classroom, this might mean that we provide a statement about the student’s message to indicate we have seen it or read it. Even a simple “thank you for posting about the topic,” and adding a few details you noticed in the post, helps a student know you read it. Acknowledging is a basic exchange and does not require additional interpretation or any discussion.
Validating goes beyond just acknowledging. Validating means that in some way, we let others know we accept their point of view and their feelings, even if we don’t agree. We are basically saying that their statements are valid. You don’t try to correct them, persuade them, or tell them their viewpoint is wrong. Validation is an empathetic way of communicating and is not judgmental. This isn’t about facts and data but much more about others’ life experiences and preferences and opinions. To be helpful, validating must show that you really hear the other person and understand why they feel the way they do.
Affirming is a way to recognize a person’s strengths or positive behaviors and improvements. The intention behind these statements is that they support a person’s growth and their capacity to learn and change. They are only effective when they are true. As online educators, we might respond to a student’s idea as a helpful suggestion or respond to their application of the concepts as original and resourceful. As they continue to learn and develop, affirming statements help our students feel seen and understood, and they also praise evidence of their growth with specific evidence along the way.
As we close out this episode about types of listening and three ways to acknowledge what we hear, I realize this is a lot of information! My suggestion is to pick only of these ideas to try out and see what happens. And remember, that these are foundational ideas. It’s likely you’re already going beyond these strategies by questioning, challenging, building on students’ ideas, and redirecting them when needed. And by trying one new concept this coming week, you’re going to add variety to your listening approach online. And who knows? Your students might even like it! Thank you for listening today, and best wishes in your online teaching this coming week.
This is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge podcast. To share comments and requests for future episodes, please visit bethaniehansen.com/request. Best switches this coming week in your online teaching journey.
by Bethanie Hansen | Best practices, Higher Education, Podcast, Students, Teaching Online
This content first appeared on APUEdge.Com.
Podcast with Dr. Bethanie L. Hansen, Associate Dean (Interim), School of Arts, Humanities and Education
The goal of culturally responsive teaching is to help students feel more comfortable, connected and understood in the classroom. In this episode, APU’s Dr. Bethanie Hansen provides guidance to help educators invite students to share more about themselves, their background, and their culture to create a more inclusive learning environment.
Listen to the Episode:
Subscribe to Online Teaching Lounge
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Pandora
Read the Transcript:
Bethanie Hansen: This podcast is for educators, academics and parents, who know that online teaching can be challenging, but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun! Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen. And I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.
Welcome to the podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about culturally responsive teaching and learning. Have you ever heard of this term? It’s sometimes abbreviated CLR, which would be “culturally and linguistically responsive” teaching. There are many different kinds of approaches and there’s a lot of information out there. So, I would just like to share a few tips and tidbits with you today, just to get you started on this topic.
The first tip is coming from a book by Shell Education called “50 Strategies for Your Virtual Classroom,” by Jennifer Jump. And in her book, she has a section called culturally responsive learning, if you have that book, it’s page 13. And I’m just going to quote her here. She says:
“Culturally and linguistically responsive teaching expert Dr. Sharroky Hollie (2020) defines a culturally responsive mindset in the following way: ‘Being culturally responsive is an approach to living life in a way that practices the validation and affirmation of different cultures for the purposes of moving beyond race and moving below the superficial focus on culture.’ When educators use culturally responsive teaching strategies, students are more engaged, which in turn helps them to be more successful, academically.”
So, there’s our start today, to be thinking about and talking about. The goal is to bring out students’ real identities and who they really are, to help them feel more comfortable, more connected, and more understood in the classroom. But I think it goes a little bit beyond this. And that is how we can appreciate and understand our students from whichever place they come from, and whatever beliefs they have, and whatever understandings they have. And we can also show up ourselves.
We, too, have an identity and a background and a culture that may be part of sharing. Maybe it’s part of our social presence; maybe it’s part of our invitation, to invite our students to bring in who they are and be themselves in the classroom as well.
And when we talk about culturally responsive teaching and learning, there’s an article out there by Laura Rychly and Emily Graves in the magazine, “Multicultural Perspectives,” volume 14, number one from 2012. I realize that’s about 10 years ago, but these concepts are very much relevant today. And I’m going to just read from the summary here some pertinent ideas you might care about.
“Culturally responsive pedagogy, as defined by one of the most prominent authors in the field. Geneva Gay (2002), is, ‘using the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively.”
Cultivate Four Practices to Implement Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning
So, we’re understanding that culturally responsive teaching and learning means that we are using some “teaching practices that attend to the specific cultural characteristics that make [our] students different from one another, and from their teacher.” Cultural characteristics might be things like our values, our traditions, and our language.
And those are kind of on one level, then if we go a little bit deeper here, we’re going to also can include the concepts of how we communicate, what we communicate, learning styles we might have; things that are traditionally done in our method of learning, culturally, might even include group versus individual work, for example. And also relationship norms. There are a lot of specifics from one culture to the next about how various relationships speak to each other, whether it’s teacher-to-student, student-to-peer, student-to-other leaders, etc.
Culturally responsive pedagogy means that our main objective is that we’re going to be able to reach everyone and educate everyone in the way that we can reach them best. So, in this chapter that I mentioned by Laura Rychly and Emily Graves, this is actually a literature review about a lot of different research that’s been done on multicultural or culturally responsive pedagogy. And there are four practices that come out, which I’d like to highlight for you here.
Being Empathetic and Caring
And that is first, that the teacher is empathetic and caring. And of course, that means that when we hear our students, when they communicate to us, we’re going to be able to validate their experiences, different from our own or similar to our own, it doesn’t matter. We can validate. Validating is just affirming and legitimizing that someone else’s experience is every bit as real as our own experience or someone else’s. So, all those experiences are valid, valuable and worth contributing. And, of course, we can give a lot of upfront instruction and guidance to communicate that empathy and that caring to all of our students and help them to know how to engage.
Be Reflective about People from Other Cultures
The second point that comes out from this article is that they are reflective about their beliefs about people from other cultures. And this one’s particularly important, it’s a pretty obvious point that we might have implicit bias about groups of people or cultures. Interestingly enough, we might even have biases about our own.
For example, if we find a student from our own cultural background, we might assume we know how they think and feel or what they might understand. And that’s really not true. We didn’t grow up with these people, we’re not in the same household, or even the same person that they are.
And as clear as that may sound, we want to question our assumptions about groups, about individuals and even about our own, when we run into students who come from similar backgrounds. There can be areas on which we can connect to students, but there can also be assumptions that are not correct, that become barriers if we believe these things. So, reflecting on our beliefs about people from other cultures is a solid practice that will help us with culturally responsive teaching and learning.
Be Reflective about Assumptions Regarding Culture
Third, they are reflective about their own cultural frames of reference. Again, looking at our own world from the inside out, and then trying to be objective looking from the outside in so that we can understand how we might present ourselves to others, and what assumptions we have.
Be Knowledgeable about Other Cultures
And lastly, that they are knowledgeable about other cultures. This requires a little bit of learning on our part. Those of you who have been to many places in the world, interacted with people of many cultures and backgrounds, you have already some helps in this direction. And if we’ve really developed over time in a single place, and we haven’t traveled much, or known very many cultures outside our own, this could be an area for growth. Something we need to stretch into and learn more about others.
There’s some data shared in this article about teacher characteristics for culturally responsive pedagogy that might be useful to you. There is a diverse student population across the United States that needs more education and education that reaches them where they are, especially our adult learners. Many people grow up into adulthood, and when they come to college, they’re already wondering, should they even be there? They’re wondering, is it a good fit for them? Can they do it? Can they make it?
And having some culturally responsive approaches in our teaching, meeting students where they are and learning what their needs are to best connect with them and help them engage in the discourse or the academic content, that’s going to help them a lot. So, we have some ideas around who we can be as teachers, what we can do to help reach students best through a culturally responsive approach, and then we also have some specific strategies we can use.
Try Strategies to Become More Culturally Responsive
The first one I already mentioned, validating our students. A second one would be affirming. Affirming means that we are just giving some acknowledgement to the student’s experience and allowing them the space to be who they are. We don’t necessarily need to correct them on what is right or wrong, based on their own background, but we do need to teach the content in a way that they can connect to it, use it, and grow from that content and from that experience.
Through validating and affirming students throughout the classroom and our activities, we’re going to be building relationships with them by showing them we care—that’s that empathy and caring that was mentioned in the teacher traits. And we’re also going to be able to build bridges from where we are or where our students are to where we are. So, we’re going to be able to help them connect to things that might be outside their norm, or outside their realm of experience.
Now, what we know about adult learners is that they want to bring their own experiences into the classroom. If we come at our teaching with a culturally responsive approach to teaching and learning, we will be expecting that and inviting it. And the more we can invite our students to be who they are to share their own experiences and we can be more aware of our attitudes, our cultural understanding, and also what our students may need to be invited out and share those things, the more we’re going to be able to build those relationships that support students’ learning and success.
Whether or not you already have the experience with culturally responsive teaching and learning, we can all start now and take the step to invite students to share. It’s something we can do through sharing our own background, through using culturally responsive language and the way we communicate that is inviting and open to sharing across students, and students to faculty, and faculty to students as well.
And we can also include resources, images, videos, from a variety of cultures. In selecting the materials that we put before our students, we can use largely diverse groups of people in those materials, and diverse approaches to give plenty of examples and things that students can connect to. The more we do this, the more we can celebrate the uniqueness of each person in our classroom and we can meet them where they really are.
Now, the more we think about multicultural teaching, or culturally responsive teaching, the more we can think about the invitation to have confidence and be oneself. There’s sort of a motivational framework that exists, whether you’re motivated to have a job, motivated to take a class, motivated to do anything, really. And the motivational framework has to do with being able to contribute, first of all, so you have some kind of special value there or meaning in the experience. And that would be a great foundation for culturally responsive teaching.
If students are asking the question, is this work meaningful to me? And if they’re able to say yes to that, then that means we’ve bridged that gap in some way or helped them to do so.
Secondly, is this experience going to give me a chance to develop? So, when we’ve reached our students in a way that connects to what they already know, and what they like to continue learning, and is somewhat in a context that meets them where they are, then they will continue developing and they will have that opportunity. So, we want students to be able to say yes to that question.
Third, am I going to learn new things? Which is different from developing, right? Developing means I’m going to grow as a human being. Learning new things could be skills, facts, information, schema, academic vocabulary, any of those things that they need to continue in depth, or breadth throughout their academic experience.
Fourth, will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? And that question speaks to their achievement in the course and their long-term connection to their career. Will students be able to pass this class? Is there enough information they can access that’s going to meet them where they are and bridge the gap for them, so that they can be successful?
If we find that students, for example, need some kind of vocabulary database, where they can look up the terms or some kind of tutor to help them revise their essays, or whatever it is. If we provide those things or give them connections to those things at the institution, then they’re going to have the opportunity to achieve in that course, to successfully complete the course, and have some internal and external recognition for their work.
And then lastly, am I going to be given responsibility? We never want a student to have the experience of just showing up and passively listening and walking away. We want to expect rigor and high performance from all of our students. If students are given responsibility for their learning and also expected to achieve at a high level, we maintain those expectations but scaffold the steps to get there. Now we’ve given students a really satisfying experience where they are expected to have some responsibility there and to work for what they’re doing, and to come away with a sense of satisfaction and achievement.
So, we have all these things that come together in culturally responsive teaching. And, in closing, whatever approaches you’re using to encourage your students to discuss their experiences and connect to their backgrounds and the depth of who they are, always remember to invite. Inviting is the best approach possible. The more you invite students to share these things and affirm and acknowledge them and validate them when they do share, the more open and accepting and inviting your classroom is going to be. And that’s going to be a positive experience for our students. That’ll get us a good start on the path of culturally responsive teaching and learning. Thank you for being here today. I wish you all the best in your online teaching this coming week.
This is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge podcast. To share comments and requests for future episodes, please visit bethaniehansen.com/request. Best switches this coming week in your online teaching journey.
