The benefits of listening to student’s ideas to re-plan teaching

Abstract

Often we, as high-school teachers (and even as pre-service teachers) fail to acknowledge the great importance of listening to our student’s ideas. Sometimes their unexpected questions put us in uncomfortable situations because we believe that answers like “I will get back to you with that question next class” can undermine our authority. Other times, we know that attending to certain questions can demand more time than expected, and this could keep us from covering the syllabus. Sometimes we even disregard students´ questions simply because we are not paying enough attention, or we are not accustomed to listening to them. In this paper, we describe a part of our experience during our professional practice to become teachers. We show examples in which listening to students in order to plan or re-design our teaching strategies tuned with their interests helped us to achieve our teaching goals. Perhaps it is a good time to start exercising the difficult art of listening.