5 Top Tips: How to listen so your child will talk

Lately I’ve been worrying about one of my high school students. Chun (name changed) is academically successful and well liked by her peers. In school, she smiles and chats with friends and teachers, her face successfully concealing the storm that rages within her everyday.  

Chun and I have a good relationship, and she sometimes confides in me. In one particularly troubling conversation, she confessed her attempts to harm herself and disclosed her deep feelings of despair, anxiety, and futility. I asked her whether she had talked to her parents about her feelings – did they know the depth of her anxiety and depression?

“My parents don’t listen to me, they never really have,” she said, her voice trailing off.

My conversation with Chun reminded me of the pressing need to create strong relationships with our kids when they are young and receptive. If we build and strengthen close relationships with our kids when they are young, then perhaps they will trust us and talk to us when they are older

5 Top Tips : How To Listen To Your Child:

    Here’s a great rule for life: Judge Less, Empathize More.

As parents, we tend to judge and evaluate everything our kids say because we want to help them do better. But in our desire to help, reform, advise, teach and instruct, we often forget to really hear what our kids are saying and what they are feeling.

So next time your child tells you anything, don’t pass judgment. Instead, just listen carefully and try to understand how your child feels.

Prioritize your relationship with your child and think long term.

In today’s world, we parents are often so anxious about short term goals, that we forget what really matters in the long run.

At the end of the day, our children’s happiness matters more than their achievements, and our relationship with them matters more than their marks and scores.  When they are teens and adults, we want them to enjoy being with us, and we want them to willingly share their lives with us.

So next time you’re anxious, think long term. Don’t nag and instruct, but instead sit down and listen. Listening is the foundation for a strong and close relationship.

Create Rituals in your day, where you have time to chat with your kids:

• Bedtime -- when you can cuddle up with your little one and listen to her talk
• Tea-time -- when I was working part-time and had the luxury of doing this, I used to love sitting at the dining table with my kids when they got home from school and chatting with them about their day. I'd play soft music, they'd eat their snack, and I would have a cup of tea. And we'd enjoy each other's company. And most importantly, I'd listen!
• Car-time -- If you drive your kids to school in the morning, that can be a great time to ask a question and listen to your child talk. 

Note: I would advise putting away all phones and laptops during these ritualized talking/bonding times.

Ask Kids Questions, and master the art of the follow-up question

 If you get into the habit of asking kids questions, they will get into the habit of telling you more about themselves. Ask them open-ended questions and let them talk.  Show them that you’re interested in their lives.

Ask them how their day went, how they’re feeling, and what they think…and then (and here’s the hard part!) keep your mouth closed and listen to their responses. Try to really hear what they are saying and feeling.

When your child tells you about something that happened in school, don’t immediately offer advice. Instead, ask follow-up questions: Why did you do that? Do you think you did the right thing? How did that make you feel? What did the other kids do? What did she say next? What were you thinking at the time?

Put away your digital devices, look at your kids, and give them your full attention.

A few days ago, my seven-year old daughter gave me the best piece of advice I’ve gotten in a long time. I was on my laptop looking at my twitter feed. She wanted to chat, but I told her to wait a minute while I read an article.

She shook her head at me and said, “Mama, I’m far more important to you than all the people you are following on Twitter, so please shut down your laptop and listen to me instead of them.”

 I’m proud to say I did – I held her tightly on my lap and I listened carefully as she told me all about her day at school.

And here's an article in SmartParents.SG that I contributed to ... also on listening to your kids.

Awash in Data: The perils of a data-driven education culture

Where's the data? What kind of data has value? And what are educators in schools doing with all this data?

Here's a great piece from Education Week on the uselessness of tomes of education data.

As a high school teacher, I've been struggling with all the emphasis on data and scores. We keep track of tons of scores -- standardized test scores, predictive scores, mock exam scores -- in a huge excel spreadsheet at school.  My kids complete math drills online, and then get scoresheets that track their performances in a number of different ways. Teachers who use Harkness tables for student run discussions are encouraged to gather data on which students speak and how much they speak. And in the Lab school started by Sal Khan in the US, (which I wrote about here), every conversation becomes an exercise in data gathering.

We educators are awash in a sea of data.

But you know what? I think that all this data collection has little value. And in fact, I think that our emphasis on data can actually be a dangerous thing. And here's why.

Firstly, as the author of the article in Ed Week points out, most of this data doesn't lead to student improvement in any way. In the old-fashioned world of education, teachers would give kids tests or assessments that required the kids to study and work. Then teachers would grade these tests/assessments and offer lots of targeted feedback. Kids would do "corrections," or in the case of an essay, "a revision," to show that they had learnt from their mistakes. While teachers wouldn't be collecting reams of data, they would be engaged in making sure that students learnt from their mistakes. These teacher-developed classroom assessments were all that parents, students, and teachers really needed to ensure that kids were learning.

In today's world, kids take a million tests that have nothing to do with what's going on in the classroom, and schools are constantly trying to mine all kinds of data -- but there's no feedback loop from teacher to student, and there's no emphasis on corrections, revisions, and actual learning. So what's the point?

Secondly, there's something inherently dehumanizing about all this data. The information that I feel matters most to me as a teacher is not stuff that can be captured using numbers and spreadsheets.

It's not numerical data I'm looking for.
What I'm looking for is the look of triumph in a student's eye when she finally makes connections and understands something important.
I'm looking at the child who refuses to meet my eye because he's clearly upset about something.
And I learn a lot from those casual conversations in the hallway, or the off-hand comment a child makes about a book she just read.
I'm looking for the wonderful piece of writing that a child shares with me, where I can see what she's thinking about and how she's working through the writing process.
I'm looking for the feeling of energy in the classroom as kids engage in a heated discussion.

Increasingly, I feel as though technology, testing, and the emphasis on data collection are somehow dehumanizing education.

We're turning a fundamentally human profession based on human relationships into a data gathering exercise where kids become reduced to a series of numbers in an excel spreadsheet. And that scares me.

Salman Khan's Lab School: Will it work?

I just read this really interesting article about Sal Khan's (of Khan academy fame) new lab school in California.

He's putting some of his ideas about contemporary education into practice:

• year-round school
• technological tools to teach reading and math so that kids can move at their own pace
• lots of data about each kid (everything is tracked)
• an emphasis on mastery of skills as opposed to just exposure
• and a school that functions more like a tech start-up than a traditional school -- as in kids have flexible schedules and more ownership over their time, and they get to work on "passion projects" of their own

As an educator who has been working in schools for close to two decades now, I'm fascinated. Will this experiment work? And what would it feel like to teach in this kind of a school? I love the commitment to mastery and experimentation. I think the school would be an exciting place.

BUT here are some of the questions I have:

- What is the consequence of learning from machines instead of humans? Can machines motivate better than human teachers? Or will there be something missing? 

- Are young kids really ready to pursue passion projects -- like starting an NGO -- or do they need time to grow up a bit before they can do this stuff in a way that will be fulfilling? Are we expecting novices to act like experts? Does that make sense?

- What do we give up (as teachers and as students) when we don't have long breaks away from school/work? I've always loved the academic schedule -- with a clear beginning of the year to start afresh, and a purposeful end to work towards. I've always loved summer vacations - that lack of structure and that get-a-way from the craziness and intensity of school. And I honestly think that the corporate world should incorporate the academic year schedule into their workplaces, as opposed to schools incorporating a corporate schedule.

- Is there such a thing as too much data on students? Schools and teachers are already so awash in data, and I wonder whether it's useful to have this much "objective" data about kids. As a teacher who works closely with kids, the data I like best, the data I find most useful, is not the kind of data one can track. It's what I learn from a conversation with a student in the hallway, or from the comment a student makes during discussion. It's what I learn when I watch a student in my classroom - when I watch her body language or notice the look in her eyes. It's what I learn when I engage in a casual conversation with a parent. It's the everyday stuff of human interactions. And that's what really allows me to get to know a child and build a relationship with him or her. And I would never want to put any of that stuff into an excel spreadsheet.

So, in conclusion, I'm fascinated but still a little skeptical. But I loved Sal Khan's book, The One World Schoolhouse, and I think he has some great ideas. Let's see how the school works out!