The Day A Student Overheard What the Superintendent Said to Me

Ever notice how children don’t miss anything adults say to each other?  They hear what adults say to each other even when the adults don’t hear each other. I find it interesting that there is a mismatch between listening and age: research shows that little children hear more of what’s said but have fewer skills to process what they hear.  Adults, on the other hand, hear less of what is said while having more skills to process the information they didn’t hear.

 

While children hear and retain more than adults, the talent they don’t have is tactfulness.  For example, one day, after the superintendent watched my math class, she debriefed with me off to the side while the children were transitioning to another subject. After complimenting the lesson, she gave me a few suggestions.

 

For a moment, I wasn’t sure if I’d impressed or horrified this district leader. That’s when one of my students spoke up. 

 

“I bet the old lady with the fancy clothes is your boss, and she came in to watch you teach,” a girl said in front of the class.  “Yes,” I replied, “She is the Superintendent, the boss of the whole school district.” The student nodded knowingly. 

 

“She liked how you taught us. We could tell from the look on her face. I was also listening to what she just said to you.”

 

“Well, thank you,” I said to the student.  “I appreciate your observation.”

 

Then this girl said, “ I’m glad you didn’t screw up and get fired.”

 

For some reason, I’d only focused on the feedback portion of the superintendent’s comments, not the compliments she offered.  This student’s clear listening allowed the fullness of what my boss had said to blossom in my mind.  This little girl reminded me how poorly I’d been listening. 

 

Research from Accenture reveals that while 96 percent of professionals consider themselves good listeners, they retain only 50% of what is said. Give these same professionals another 48 hours; they’ve forgotten another 50% of what they had initially remembered.^[1]  Based on this, it shouldn’t surprise anyone it can take a school over four years to make meaningful instructional or cultural shifts.^[2]  If all the adults involved in the planning, implementation, and execution of these shifts only hear about 25% of what they are saying to each other, it’s amazing it doesn’t take longer than that. Imagine you are on a team trying to navigate to a specific location, and 75% of the map is missing.

 

No wonder school improvement efforts often end in disaster.

 

The Research on Adult Listening: Other research on listening shows that while people can think up to 800 words per minute, they can only speak about 100.  At any given moment, we are only hearing about ⅛ of the meaning of what people are trying to say.  If it takes a while for a person to explain something, adults tend to fill in the gaps, make assumptions, or listen to what agrees or disagrees with what they know. Unfortunately, this type of listening doesn’t help two brains expand their thinking; it just confirms what they already know.

 

When making meaning is the goal of listening, the listener's job is less about creating meaning for themselves and more about helping the speaker make sense of what they are thinking.^[3] Listening becomes, at that moment, less a thing to receive and more a gift to give.

 

As a certified professional coach, former school teacher, and administrator, I’ve learned that while children are excellent at listening and less developed in sense-making, adults are exceptional at sense-making but frequently forget how to listen deeply. If most management problems can be boiled down to poor communication, focusing on the quality of hearing in the workplace might be an excellent place to start.

 

Why Children Hear Things You Might Not: We guide children to listen carefully.  They learn to raise their hands, take turns, use a “talking stick,” turn their bodies toward the speaker, and make eye contact.  They are frequently reminded of these things because deep listening engages the thinking part of our brain - these are the harder cognitive processes that require energy, focus, and work.  Unlike the easier automatic processes of our brain, deep listening is  hard - which is why the brain tends to avoid it.^[4] Without the constant reminders to engage in this type of listening, the “General Law of Least Effort” applies more frequently to the thinking we apply to an ever-complex world. As psychologist and Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman explains,

 

“A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, the effort is a cost, and the balance of benefits and costs drives the acquisition of skill. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”^[5]

 

Adults practice  “filtering” as they listen to others. They listen at a surface level.  Their brains automatically add in assumptions, biases, or inferences to ease the process of meaning from what others say. Operating at this surface level allows the brain’s “law of least effort” to filter the listening process. The problem with this tendency is many adults don’t stop filtering - even when they’d save time by allowing for a better, more profound listening experience with another person.  Knowing when to stop filtering and “tune your listening instrument”^[6] is the key to better group meaning-making.  Shutting off cognitive filtering is not an easy thing to do.  It requires shutting off our internal dialogue to allow the fullness of what others are saying to fill our heads.

 

Plan For “Tuning:” We cannot assume all adults have “tuned” their listening instrument at the start of every critical group or personal conversation.  It is honoring the adult learner to take steps to ensure they can.  Every critical conversation rests on a foundation of deep listening design. 

 

Here are some ideas for accomplishing this:

-               Select a discussion protocol designed to hold cognitive bias or judgments at bay until each participant feels heard:

-               Spend time as a team learning about the Ladder of Inferences and co-create processes that leverage this understanding.

-               Engage your team in learning about The Five Levels of Listening.

-               Prepare your listening skills for essential conversations by doing your best to clear your mind of assumptions, judgment, or possible biases.

 

The next time you have an essential conversation with another person, plan to offer them the gift of forgetting what you were about to say or think. 

 

Witness what blossoms. 

 

 

-        Chris Briggs-Hale

Certified Professional Coach

https://waterfalllearning.com/

 

Chris Briggs-Hale is the CEO of Waterfall Learning, LLC, and a Certified Professional Coach.  He served public schools for 30 years, 15 of which were as a principal.  Chris served as a Senior Consultant for McRel and Marzano and Associates, a site visitor for the National Schools of Character Award (Character.org), and was a Board Member with Eunice Kennedy Shriver for the Community of Caring in Washington, DC. Chris has consulted for schools extensively across the United States. He is the recipient of the 2013 Red Cross Community Hero Award, the 2004 Sally K. Lenhardt Professional Leadership Award from Lesley University, the 2004 Community of Caring National Administrator of the Year, and the 2013 Community Service Hero, American Red Cross, Colorado Springs.

 

References:

 

Frey, N., Fisher, D., & Smith, D. (2019). All Learning Is Social and Emotional ([edition unavailable]). ASCD. Retrieved 22 January 2023 from https://www.perlego.com/book/3292585/all-learning-is-social-and-emotional-helping-students-develop-essential-skills-for-the-classroom-and-beyond-pdf (Original work published 17 January 2019)

 

Giordano, Joanne B. “Accenture Research Finds Listening More Difficult in Today's Digital Workplace.” Newsroom, Accenture, 25 Feb. 1970, https://newsroom.accenture.com/industries/global-media-industry-analyst-relations/accenture-research-finds-listening-more-difficult-in-todays-digital-workplace.htm.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

 

Kahneman, Daniel. “Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice [Excerpt].” Scientific American, Scientific American, 15 June 2012, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kahneman-excerpt-thinking-fast-and-slow/.

Pannuzzo, Anna. “It Can Take 3-5 Years to Create a Positive Change to Workplace Culture but Only a Couple of Days to Ruin It.” LinkedIn, 18 Mar. 2019, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-take-3-5-years-create-positive-change-workplace-culture-pannuzzo/.

Trimboli, Arthur. “How to Listen - Discover the Hidden Key to Better Communication.” Oscar Trimboli | Deep Listening: Impact Beyond Words, 5 Apr. 2022, https://www.oscartrimboli.com/greatlistenerstune/.

Trimboli, Arthur. “Podcast Episode 059: The Five Levels of Listening – Listening for the Meaning - Oscar Trimboli: Deep Listening: Impact Beyond Words.” Oscar Trimboli | Deep Listening: Impact Beyond Words, 11 May 2020, https://www.oscartrimboli.com/podcast/059/.

Vaghri, Z., Covell, K. & Clow, H. (2018). Wiring the brain for participation through

active listening and active learning. The Canadian Journal of Children’s Rights, 5(1),

71-85. Retrieved from:

https://ojs.library.carleton.ca/index.php/cjcr/article/view/1248

 

 

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^[1] https://newsroom.accenture.com/industries/global-media-industry-analyst-relations/accenture-research-finds-listening-more-difficult-in-todays-digital-workplace.htm

^[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-take-3-5-years-create-positive-change-workplace-culture-pannuzzo/

 

^[3] https://www.oscartrimboli.com/podcast/059/

 

^[4] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kahneman-excerpt-thinking-fast-and-slow/

 

^[5] Daniel Kahneman (2011). “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, p.39, Macmillan

 

^[6] https://www.oscartrimboli.com/greatlistenerstune/

 

The One Instructional Coaching Question That Changed Everything

A single, well-crafted question from an instructional coach woke me up from the dream that my students owned their learning. At that time,  I could create standards-based lessons with good criteria-referenced assessments and structure a work-focused writer’s workshop.  My classroom was a place where students had fun and were compliant, but on their own, they didn’t know what to do next. My writing scores were flat, and I couldn’t figure out why.  Students loved being audiences to each other’s essays and narratives, yet their skills remained stagnant. The students needed me for each step. I didn’t realize that the success criteria for each stage were only inside my head, not theirs.

 

The profound question that changed my teaching came in the fall of the year I returned to the classroom.  I was coming off a successful stint as a school principal and a nationwide consultant and returned to the classroom to see if I still had the “chops” to reach student learners. Specifically, I wanted to know if I could achieve the student learning results suggested by the research I’d been promoting on the road.

 

My coach was late to her weekly observation.  When she arrived, she signaled to me urgently from the door. 

 

“I’m sorry, but I have to reschedule,” she whispered as I approached. 

 

She looked over my shoulder.  “I got to go, but before I do, I’ll leave you with one question.  Why are all your student’s hands raised while you aren’t with them?”

 

“Huh?” I replied.

 

“Turn around,” she said, “I’ll leave you to think about that.” And with that, off she went. 

 

I stood in the doorway and looked at my class.  All of them had a hand in the air. Each lacked the confidence to take the next step with their writing without me.  I’d been so focused on the instructional behaviors that I forgot to stand back and observe the resulting student learning behaviors.  I’d made all the right moves in creating a standards-based lesson with a criteria-based formative assessment. Except my students still didn’t get it. The number of hands in the air proved this. I wasn’t teaching them to write; I was teaching them to be helpless. 

 

I stopped and went to the front of the classroom. Laughing at myself, I called them together.

 

“You know, the fact that all your hands are in the air suggests I’ve been unfair to you all.”

 

They looked quizzically at me. 

 

“I shouldn’t be the only one who knows the next step.  You are all smart, hard-working, and curious.  I can do better.” 

 

I know many of them had no idea what I was saying. But, I noticed the tension in the room vanish. They were shifting from an awful sense of helplessness to warm curiosity.

 

I was growing at that moment too.  I realized I was trying to control every step in unison to ensure a good product from each of them.  They had to see the next steps for themselves.  They had to have clarity on the next tiny step and be free to try it, mess up, revise it, and try again - all on their own.

 

Over the subsequent weeks and months, my class and I examined exemplar writing samples for each type of writing we were learning.  Through dialogue, small group discussions, and fascinating, friendly debates, my fourth graders created model writing examples to demonstrate how a particular skill evolves toward the standard.  We even made “Watch Me Grow” charts that students used in writing and for their math work.  It was fun; more importantly, they owned each step they took.  

 

That year, I had an enormous and impressive bump in my writing scores and, interestingly, a giant leap in their reading proficiency.  While I can’t prove the link directly, I can say my students “lived like writers” daily.  We celebrated sentence transitions, word choice, and sentence structure and dove deep into word entomology.  All because I let go of needing to be the answer for them and instead trusted them to provide solutions for themselves.

 

I always cried when every class left my room on the last day of school, but that year in the minutes the room was silent for the summer, I was a mess.  With this class, we grew together. I am still in touch with many of these fourth graders, now adults.

 

Looking back, I realize that a single, profound question from a skilled instructional coach transformed my career.  However, I learned much more than how to help students own their learning.  I learned never to underestimate the power of leading through a great question. 

 

Chris Briggs-Hale

Professional Coach

https://waterfalllearning.com/

Chris Briggs-Hale:

 

Chris Briggs-Hale is the CEO of Waterfall Learning, LLC, and a Certified Professional Coach.  He served public schools for 30 years, 15 of which were as a principal.  Chris served as a Senior Consultant for McRel and Marzano and Associates, a site visitor for the National Schools of Character Award (Character.org), and was a Board Member with Eunice Kennedy Shriver for the Community of Caring in Washington, DC. Chris has consulted for schools extensively across the United States. He is the recipient of the 2013 Red Cross Community Hero Award, the 2004 Sally K. Lenhardt Professional Leadership Award from Lesley University, the 2004 Community of Caring National Administrator of the Year, and the 2013 Community Service Hero, American Red Cross, Colorado Springs. 

 

Chris graduated from Bates College and received his M.Ed. from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, and a Principal’s Licence from the University of Denver. Chris served as a Staff Assistant at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University before entering the public school system.