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Learning to listen: from historical sources to classroom practice

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Abstract

Listening to students in productive ways seems to be at the core of teaching practices aligned with the basic tenets of the constructivist world view. We present a definition for productive ways of listening, discuss the challenges involved in implementing it, and propose a way to support the “decentering” needed to learning to listen for teacher education programs. The proposal is based on reading and understanding historical texts as a way to exercising the adoption of the ‘other’s perspective.’ We describe the materials developed for teacher workshops, their implementation and what participants, and we, learned from the experience.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the workshop participants for their enthusiastic involvement and for their openness to share with us their views and criticisms.

We are grateful to Professors Hiroshi Iwasaki and Hitoshi Takahashi, Joetsu University of Education, for inviting us to conduct the second workshop and for their insightful comments on this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel

    Abraham Arcavi

  2. CRICED, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba-shi, 305-8572, Japan

    Masami Isoda

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  1. Abraham Arcavi
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  2. Masami Isoda
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Correspondence to Abraham Arcavi.

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Arcavi, A., Isoda, M. Learning to listen: from historical sources to classroom practice. Educ Stud Math 66, 111–129 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-006-9075-8

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