Instructor listening during lecture: A case from introductory chemistry

Part of learning science is practicing reasoning, but some of the most common approaches to science instruction offer students little opportunity to do that, especially in the whole-class setting of large-enrollment courses. We present and closely examine a single episode of instructor listening – an instructor deliberately adopting a stance, and establishing a classroom culture, in which students’ nascent efforts at disciplinary reasoning are elicited, made sense of, and integrated into the collective learning process – in a 140-student introductory chemistry class, as an exemplar of what such instruction can look like. We delineate five aspects of the focal episode that mark it as exemplary of a listening approach to instruction. And we consider concerns about and potential value of such an approach.