When considering listening, I need to be mindful of what I say and how I say it. It’s so easy to imagine our thoughts and ideas are being clearly communicated, because we understand what we mean. But each one of us listens with our own ears, we interpret as we listen, we fill in the blanks when key information is missing, and sometimes there’s a running dialogue in our heads that drowns out what we were supposed to be listening to in the first place. Not only that, our own personal experience with the person we’re listening to colours the way we interpret what they say. And then our own many layers of mood and emotion, the stories we tend to tell ourselves (our inner narrative) and the body language and energy of the speaker that influences the way we receive their words compounds these other elements, and it’s a recipe for, well, miscommunication.
This has played out in a few ways this week. One was a litany of misunderstandings and misconceptions with a particular student, where intentions were misunderstood and incorrect assumptions were made. This eroded trust and impacted learning. Now hopefully resolved, but boy, was it rough.
Another was when a student (during an interaction in the group learning setting with another student), following my comment that my instruction to “really get low in the body, release the hip joints and jump into the floor” was “not a metaphor”, said it had landed powerfully. He admitted it had never previously dawned on him that when I said things like this, I actually wanted him to DO IT. I was floored. It had never occurred to me (all those years, when I was jumping around the room like an ape, trying to get students to mirror me and they just looked at me blankly) that the student had simply not understood. They were listening, they were watching, but they were imagining that what I was demonstrating was an outward manifestation of some kind of wild energy that I hoped they would muster in an understated but real way. In actual fact, what I wanted them to do was mirror my actions, so that they could feel the intensity of the physical engagement I was embodying. But I DIDN’T SAY IT. Or I didn’t say it clearly. I didn’t say: I would like you to do this, do as I am doing, literally jump into the floor, grunt and release your hip joints as you sing.
Mic drop.
I need to listen. Better. Listen to what students are saying to me, whether with their words or their actions. And I need to articulate more clearly the intention of my instructions, even if it seems really obvious to me. So that their listening is accompanied by understanding.