Teaching Listening

This page is still UNDER DEVELOPMENT! For now, I can share a version of my syllabus for an advanced undergraduate course in listening that I developed for the National Communication Association's syllabus sharing initiative.

Also, I provide below links to two lectures that I developed for the Certified Listening Program of the International Listening Association. That program was suspended, but if you are interested in "becoming a professional listener" I have developed materials and would love to help coach you through that! Contact me here.

Thinking Like a Researcher

Doing research is messy – good research is generative, not bound to strict rules but guided by procedures and still able to change the way we think about our lives and those around us.  As researchers we have guidelines, but like all guidelines there are exceptions made and reasons for breaking norm. 

This talk is about how to think like a researcher, someone who is passionate about ideas and even more so about watching others succeed in generated new and exciting ways of knowing about listening and human behavior. 

Acting Like a Researcher

One of my favorite philosophers, Charles Sanders Peirce, suggested that our tendency to draw certain types of inferences and thus settle doubt is a habit of mind.  In my last presentation I discussed several attitudes necessary for conducting good research; if held, these attitudes help constitute a habit of mind akin to a scientist whose sole concern according to Peirce is to settle opinion in a particular way. 

In this talk, I briefly define "the scientific method" (at least how I see it) and then spend most of the remaining time with the nuts and bolts of design and data issues you face as you think about how to fix belief regarding listening and human communication.