Listening and Interruption
Reflections on Dr. Rebecca Rolland's "Rich Talk"
I came across an interesting conversation last week about conversations with kids. The Learning Scientists pod featured Dr. Rebecca Rolland for a chat around her new book called The Art of Talking with Children. The whole episode is definitely worth checking out—I’ve probably mentioned it to at least five people since the end of last week.
Dr. Rolland has developed a framework she calls “rich talk” to describe the types of conversations we ought to strive for with little ones. She uses a three-E mnemonic to outline aspects we ought keep in mind when having conversations:
Expand: Help others use more specific emotional language
Explore: Dive into fresh ways of discussing the past and reading into others’ minds
Evaluate: Test our compassionate actions or responses, then ask: “How did that go?”
Source: https://www.endeavorschools.com/interview-with-rebecca-rolland-author-of-the-art-of-talking-with-children/
As “explore” above implies, a listen to this episode really had me pondering a more expansive definition of “listening” that explicitly calls out the role of asking questions.
Listening is usually defined as attending to sound, or taking notice of what someone says. Extended second definitions begin to broach the idea of “responding,” however the responsiveness of listening seems a bit marginalized in typical dialogue about what it means to listen.
Picture it—you’re told to “listen up,” immediately this invokes a sense of the behavior desired: eyes on the speaker, attending to what is said, avoiding interruption and the like (thought SLANT does name “ask questions”). However, the response of an other in dialogue may be even more important than the ability to attend closely to what your conversation partner says.
A neat blurb I picked up from the conversation with Dr. Rolland notes some research out of MIT into the quality of conversation and its connection to outcomes. While the content of the conversation—the vocabulary, terminology, and ideas at hand—are definitely important, it’s the amount of turns back and forth that are more indicative of quality.
Dr. Rolland names this “social side” of dialogue as understated, and describes the further activation of the brain when there are more turns back and forth in a conversation. This brings out the Bakhtinian aspect of dialogue that I’ve blogged about here before—that consciousness is not an individual endeavor, that its about knowing with another, or that there is no knowing without an other.
I’ve spent the last few days really digging into Dr. Rolland’s work, reflecting on the conversations I have with others and with my own children, and thinking about implications on research and practice in conversation. For example, an idea I’m taking up once again from a reading of Nikulin on dialogue and dialectic last fall is that of interruption as a key feature of dialogue.
Surely, when we hear the advice to “listen up” we’re not thinking about how we will interrupt, but I’m not so sure about that assumption. I suppose we can talk more about the quality or character of the interruption, and perhaps that’s where I’ll go next with this blog. Please share your thoughts in the comments!