Do You Have 21st-Century Skills to Help Your Students Succeed? Do Your Students Have 21st-Century Skills to Think for Themselves? The Power of the Socratic Classroom has the answers you are looking for—answers that will supply the strategies to show students how to succeed into the future. A future that has unknown products, unidentified jobs, and unanticipated challenges. In Socratic Seminar, teachers shift to the role of facilitator, where they help their students develop the collaborative interpersonal skills, the critical and creative thinking skills, and the speaking and listening skills to face the upcoming challenges of the 21st century.
Charles Fischer has taught in public and private schools in a variety of settings, from rural Maine to inner city Atlanta. In the past 20 years, he has worked with a wide range of students from 4th grade to AP English and has been nominated for Teacher of the Year four times. He has his Master’s degree in Teaching & Learning from the University of Southern Maine, and received his B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Binghamton University. His latest book, The Power of the Socratic Classroom, has won four awards, including the NIEA Best Education Book. His first novel, Beyond Infinity, won a 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award bronze medal (YA fiction). His areas of expertise are Socratic Seminar, Active Listening, Inquiry, Teaching & Learning, and Critical & Creative Thinking. He is currently working on a book of poetry, a short story collection, and several novels.
I struggled to name this level - I just knew that there was a level of "listening" in between basic hearing and more active, more conscious listening. I settled on Assumed Listening because after a while it was an obvious choice. We probably all know people who believe themselves to be good listeners. The reality, however, is that they show the classic signs of not truly listening: distracted mind, verbal discontinuities, physical mismatches and so on. Luckily, there are simple solutions!
Book Excerpt
The Power of the Socratic Classroom
I like to include assumed listening as a level because many students and teachers believe they are good listeners—though people in their lives might disagree. In my experience, when most people think they are listening, they are instead just directing partial awareness and attention toward a speaker. Just ask most people to repeat what a previous speaker said and you will discover who is at the level of assumed listening and who may be exerting more energy toward active listening.
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