Understanding English Language Arts Teachers’ Listening Orientations in Middle School Gifted Classrooms

Within gifted education, discourse-based instructional methods, such as Socratic Seminars, are identified as strategies to support the development of gifted and advanced readers’ critical thinking skills. While research on dialogic discourse has centered on key components such as discourse patterns and the types of questions teachers ask, the unique nature of teachers’ listening has a limited research base. In this qualitative study, we examined five teachers’ perceptions, focusing on one teacher as an illustrative case, of their listening during dialogic discourse-based lessons with gifted and advanced readers. Major themes included that (a) teachers’ listening is multifaceted and individualized, (b) teachers listen for certain reasons, (c) teachers’ expectations inform their and their students’ roles during discourse, and (d) teachers’ listening is related to their belief systems, and (e) there are barriers to effective listening. Implications for practice and research are discussed.