EduLead 2025

The title of this workshop is a play on the popular book by Faber & Mazlish (1999) who called their work: How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk. In fact, the title should be reversed so that listening comes first: deep listening is the foundation for trust and for risk taking. It sets psychological safety in the environment so that children (and adults) of any age can feel seen and heard. This allows the conditions for individuals to engage in conversation and contribute thinking and ideas.  
 
Part 1 will focus on deep, active listening, a very old Chinese concept represented by the character 聽 (ting). We can signal our nonjudgmental listening through the use of paraphrasing, sending three very powerful messages: “I’m listening”, “I care”, and “I understand” (or, “I’m trying to understand”). The act of paraphrasing provides psychological safety so the speaker feels heard rather than judged.

We know many reasons that psychological safety is important in the classroom: it provides an environment in which students can take intellectual risks, be creative, and engage in critical thinking. And yet, there are students who find it difficult to engage, and no matter how we might coax them, their verbal contributions to class conversations remain minimal. What might be getting in the way? How do we go about deliberately establishing an environment in which all students feel safe enough to contribute their thinking? In this workshop, we will explore ways in which teachers deliberately establish a psychologically safe space for student engagement, and how we might assess our successes.

The title of this workshop is a play on the popular book by Faber & Mazlish (1999) who called their work: How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk. In fact, the title should be reversed so that listening comes first: deep listening is the foundation for trust and for risk taking. It sets psychological safety in the environment so that children (and adults) of any age can feel seen and heard. This allows the conditions for individuals to engage in conversation and contribute thinking and ideas.  
 
Part 2 will focus on developing powerful questions that simultaneously empower and invite deeper thinking in the recipient. Unless a recipient feels truly invited to engage in thinking, they won’t, perhaps because of a fear of being judged. So, how questions are constructed to reflect an invitation, matters.