Explicitly Teaching Listening in the ELA Curriculum: Why and How?

This session will provide a brief history of listening instruction in ELA research and teaching, then present several arguments for why it should take a larger role in the Language Arts curriculum. The bulk of the session will focus on how to easily integrate listening instruction into teachers' already packed curricula, including how to teach, practice, scaffold learning, and assess listening. Listening is an essential skill required for success in school- yet we rarely, if ever, explicitly teach good listening skills in school. This session seeks to combat this neglect in the ELA curriculum. I will share my own experience as a high school reading and English teacher for 10 years, and how I now prepare future English teachers to prioritize listening not as secondary, but as a primary skill that helps students succeed in English, other content areas, and their lives outside of school. Ideally, this session will encourage ELA teachers to consider why they ought to add listening instruction purposefully and explicitly into their curriculum, and then, more importantly, how to do this. Participants will walk away with concrete strategies to use next week in their classrooms to begin fostering students' thinking about what good listening looks and feels like in the classroom and in their lives outside the classroom.