Why to listen, what kind of listening – some thoughts on \”one-to-one listening\” in kindergartens

The \”Guidelines for the Quality Assessment of Kindergarten Care Education\” (hereinafter referred to as the \”Evaluation Guidelines\”) point out: \”Attach importance to children\’s expression and representation of the games they have experienced, reading picture books, observation and other activities through drawings, narrations, etc., and teachers can \”Listen one-to-one and truly record the children\’s thoughts and experiences.\” From this, the \”one-to-one listening\” in the kindergarten is in full swing. We have seen that in some kindergartens, children line up in long lines waiting to be listened to, while teachers bow their heads silently and write furiously to record. \”Listening\” seems to have become another formalized task. Teachers can’t help but wonder: What is the value of listening? How to listen? \”Why listen\” and \”what to listen to\” Listening is not a new concept or a new requirement. Before that, preschool teachers had been listening to children in their daily lives. So, why does the Assessment Guide highlight and emphasize “one-to-one listening” in the document? Because \”listening\” is actually more fundamental than \”speaking\”. Heidegger believes that \”listening\” has a fundamental status: \”\’Being able to listen\’ is not only the result of talking to each other, but on the contrary, it is the prerequisite for talking to each other.\” [1] Two values ​​of listening When we ask preschool teachers why they should listen? It is more likely that we will get such an answer: listening helps us understand children’s existing experiences, know children’s zone of proximal development, understand children’s real thoughts, and the requirements of the \”Assessment Guide\”…At this time, listening is A means is the method and tool used by teachers to achieve educational goals and complete educational tasks and requirements. This is one of the important values ​​of listening – its instrumental value. This is also the understanding and practice of listening by early childhood teachers for a long time. As a tool, listening is beneficial to the organization and development of teaching activities, the planning and design of activity areas, and the regular management of classes, thereby better promoting the healthy growth of children and the professional development of teachers. In addition to instrumental value, listening has another kind of value—ontological value. \”Shuowen Jiezi\” explains that \”Qing\” means \”Qing\”, \”Qing\” means \”Qing\”, \”Qing\” means \”Qing\”. The original meaning of \”Qing\” is sideways or crooked. [2] \”Listen\” in modern Chinese is interpreted as \”listen carefully, listen carefully\”. It can be seen that \”listening\” is by no means a purely physiological \”listening\”, but represents an attitude and tendency. Heidegger believes that people reveal the world and themselves by speaking. Only speech brings human beings into existence with human life. [3] If people are not “heard”, perceived and understood, then people cannot exist socially. It can be seen that listening is not only a factual action, not only a way to obtain information, but also the own way of life. The existence of life is reflected in the various desires of life, the surge of emotions and thoughts in life, the differences in life and the connection with other people\’s lives. Because of the existence of life itself, the difference and unknowability of life, listening has ontological value. Listening itself reflects concern for life. For preschool teachers, listening is not only an educational method, but also the art of accepting and understanding children. It is on the premise of listening that understanding, thought, awareness and communication occur. Listening is not a taskIt is not a task or an action, but an attitude, concept, concept and value orientation. Listening is an affirmation and acknowledgment of life\’s differences and longing for understanding. Listening not only allows children to be discovered, but also allows teachers to reveal themselves. The most humanistic listening is not listening to nature or listening to others, but listening to oneself. In the process of listening to children, preschool teachers understand their own ideas, their own attitudes, and their own value orientations, thereby better understanding themselves. The Two Major Contents of Listening The \”Assessment Guide\” clearly states that the content of one-on-one listening is the \”expressive representation\” of young children. Psychologist Jerome Bruner divided representation into three categories: action representation, image representation and symbolic representation. [4] It can be seen that the content of \”one-to-one listening\” in kindergartens is by no means only directed at children\’s language. Language is only a type of symbolic representation, and its internal objects also include other representations of children, such as paintings, construction works, collage works, etc. Dance moves, created music and more. In addition to these explicit expressions, listening content also includes children\’s silent expressions. Children\’s silent expressions refer to their emotions, experiences, and underlying attitudes toward the world. Max van Menen believes that people have three kinds of secrets: survival secrets, communication secrets and personal secrets. The secret of survival points to the existence of human beings. Others themselves are completely mysterious, a kind of existence that can never be fully opened or understood; the secret of communication points to human communication, and refers to things hidden in the heart that cannot be expressed or touched. ;Personal secrets refer to a person\’s privacy and certain thoughts that they are unwilling to share with others. [5] Human beings cannot be fully understood, the developmental nature of children’s language, and human privacy. These factors together determine that preschool teachers should not only listen to children at the level of explicit expressions, but also pay more attention to their Silent expression. \”Why listen\” and \”what to listen to\” For the listener, \”listening\” is a kind of acceptance, a kind of respect, and a kind of understanding; for the listener, \”listening\” is an attitude, a bridge, a time Explore. For both parties, listening is a wonderful encounter. In order to complete this wonderful journey, preschool teachers need to hear children, hear children clearly, and understand children. Hearing children\’s voices means that teachers can hear children\’s expressions and pay attention to children, which points to the teacher\’s attitude and sensitivity towards children. This is the first level of listening and the minimum requirement. The key is that the teacher has the action of \”listening\” and completes \”physiological listening\” and \”behavioral listening\”. So, can \”hearing\” be achieved as long as there are auditory organs? In fact, not all teachers can \”hear\” young children. On the one hand, this points to the teacher\’s basic attitude towards young children, and on the other hand, it points to the teacher\’s sensitivity to the needs of young children. Only teachers who pay enough attention to children and are sensitive enough to their behaviors and needs can hear children\’s \”voices\”. Otherwise, there will be filtered listening, superficial listening, false listening, etc. Hearing is a discovery and an attitude that conveys respect. Teachers will not forget about children because they are busy, will not ignore children because of small things, and will not perfuse children because they are weak. becauseIf we pay attention to it, we will not have the phenomena of \”listening but not hearing\” and \”listening but not listening\”. Hearing children\’s words clearly means that teachers can clearly hear the specific content expressed by children. The core lies in the teacher\’s ability to receive the information expressed by children completely and correctly, which points to the preschool teacher\’s ability to analyze the content expressed by children. Listening is a multi-sensory intertwined behavior. It is not only \”listening\” but also \”seeing\”, and it also involves \”thinking\” and \”thinking\”. \”Listen clearly\” first includes a respectful attitude towards children. Teachers should give children opportunities to express themselves and listen carefully to children\’s complete expressions. They will not interrupt children\’s expressions because of their poor expressions. They will not arbitrarily predict children\’s expressions because they are weak, and try to avoid incomplete and unsound listening. Secondly, \”hearing clearly\” means that teachers can correctly understand children\’s expressions and try to avoid \”auditory hallucinations\” and \”mishearings\”. This requires teachers to have the professional ability to analyze. The listening process is also a process of thinking operation, which requires teachers to mobilize their cognition to analyze and understand the objective information conveyed by children. Understanding children understand themselves means that teachers can not only understand the content and information expressed by children, but also further understand children\’s feelings and experiences. \”Understanding\” here refers to two aspects: the various specific situations represented by children and the shared humanity of children and adults. From the perspective of specific situations, the information content represented by children is only a clue for us to get closer to the children. Teachers must also understand the information of the situation in which the children are located, including the material environment, interpersonal environment, and class cultural environment. This requires teachers to not only \”listen\” to the people, things, and objects conveyed in children\’s various representations, but also to \”listen\” to the various interactive mechanisms hidden behind children\’s words and deeds that restrict children\’s representations, so that teachers can understand the children themselves. From the perspective of shared humanity, teachers\’ listening to children should transcend the object-oriented view of children and treat children as \”people\” no different from adults. The existence of children as human beings determines that teachers\’ understanding of children does not lie in the pursuit of accuracy, but in teachers\’ ability to achieve the greatest degree of acceptance, tolerance and understanding of children based on their understanding of children. [6] Only in this way can teachers \”hear\” through various specific situations the children\’s innermost survival needs, belonging needs, desire for competence, and unremitting pursuit of freedom, interests, achievements, and dignity. [7] In short, \”listening\” is not just satisfied with obtaining factual information but listening to the children themselves and treating the children as people who need to know and understand. \”Why listen\” and \”what to listen to\” After understanding the value, content and level of listening, when we think about one-on-one listening in kindergarten, we will find that there are three types: informational one-on-one listening, interpretive one-on-one listening One-on-one listening, relational one-on-one listening. Informative one-on-one listening Informative one-on-one listening refers to one-on-one listening with the main purpose of obtaining the completeness of information. During the listening process, teachers focus on how to fully obtain the content expressed by children and try to avoid missing listening. For example, we will see children lining up in a long line, telling stories one after another, while the teacher lowers his head, writes quickly, records quickly, and puts all his attention on remembering \”all\”.One-on-one listening becomes one-on-one recording. Informative one-on-one listening has a form of listening and a respectful attitude toward children\’s expressions, but it still remains at the level of hearing children\’s voices. The teacher\’s focus on recording this matter is \”seeing things but not seeing people\” listening. In other words, teachers tend to focus on listening and ignore children as people. This will make children feel that their expression is a one-way output narrative rather than a two-way communication. Interpretive one-on-one listening Interpretive one-on-one listening refers to one-on-one listening with the main purpose of obtaining information accuracy. During the listening process, teachers are more concerned about whether they have accurately recorded what the children expressed, whether they have distorted the children\’s meaning, and try to avoid mishearing. It should be noted that the “accuracy” considered by teachers at this time refers more to the “inaccuracy” at the information level. For example, we will see that the teacher keeps asking fact-based questions while recording quickly, while the children may \”don\’t know how to answer\”, \”forgot where to go\” and \”don\’t want to talk anymore\” etc. . [8] Teachers pay too much attention to whether the recorded information is correct and focus on analyzing the content expressed by children. One-on-one listening becomes one-on-one question and answer. Interpretive one-to-one listening has a respectful attitude towards children and the thoughts of kindergarten teachers, but it still remains at the level of \”listening clearly\”. Teachers are too focused on whether the information they hear is correct and still treat children as object beings. The listening at this time is the listening of \”seeing things and people in development\”. Relational one-on-one listening Relational one-on-one listening refers to one-on-one listening with the purpose of establishing a good teacher-child relationship. During the listening process, the teacher pays attention to the content expressed by the children and pays more attention to the understanding of the children themselves. Listening at this time is a two-way flow of emotion, showing the relationship between teachers and children. Listening gradually moves from objective information to subjective understanding, and from paying attention to information to paying attention to people. We will see that teachers carefully record children\’s expressions and will also ask questions when appropriate. Teachers can understand children in specific situations and on the level of shared humanity. Teachers know the meaning and value of listening. They also know that not all expressions of young children are \”highlights\” and all ideas are amazing. What is more important is the establishment of a relationship of \”I am with you\”. Through listening, teachers and children can become co-interpreters, empathizers and co-walkers. In relational one-to-one listening, teachers and children jointly enter the living situation of others, and build a deeper mutual respect through mutual understanding. [9] This is a kind of listening that “sees things, people in development, and shared humanity.” The above three types of one-to-one listening are hierarchical and progressive to a certain extent, but they are not completely separated. In educational practice, these three types are interconnected, mutually supportive, and exist simultaneously. Even so, when we understand the one-to-one listening in the Assessment Guide as a whole, we will find that relational one-to-one listening is the more fundamental listening. The purpose of teachers\’ listening is to respond to life and to understand and support the life of \”children as human beings\”. Therefore, one-on-one listening cannot be understood as a behavioral action, but as a communication between two souls in a specific situation. Of course, getting informationIt is important, but it is even more important to give children respect, understanding and support as human beings. In this way, when faced with children\’s gushing, we do not need to mechanically record; when faced with children\’s silence, we do not need to be overly anxious and worried; when faced with children who hesitate to speak, we do not need to inquire deeply. We just need to open our hearts, be a good listener, and understand each specific child equally, not only their development, but also their humanity. In order to truly achieve what Jaspers said, \”Education is like a tree shaking a tree, a cloud pushing a cloud, and one soul awakening another soul.\”