know their ideas will be heard and taken seriously, they engage more deeply and take more risks as learners. Really attending to what a child is trying to convey, whether through gesture, silence, or an unexpected answer, is one of the most important things an early childhood teacher can do.
Shifting to deep listening is also an area for reflection that can be guided by mentoring. This kind of mentored reflection aligns with NAEYC’ s“ Professional Standards and Competencies for Early Childhood Educators,” particularly Standard 6, which calls on educators to engage in ongoing learning and reflective practice as essential to their daily work with children.
We( the authors) are both early childhood faculty at Towson University in Towson, Maryland, and previously early childhood classroom teachers( birth to grade 3). Our work supports educators across the early childhood continuum, from those entering the field to those deepening their practice. In our experiences, professional development through mentors, instructional coaches, and program or school leaders offers a unique avenue to support this shift toward deep listening. When planned intentionally, it can help a teacher examine their interactions with children and ask what happened and what could happen differently.
In this article, we show how, with professional support, a teacher can grow in deep listening. We present a framework to guide teachers through identifying communicative mismatches, understanding children’ s logic, rehearsing future interactions, and reflecting on what occurs in the classroom. We do this in a way that educators working with children from infancy to third grade can easily implement it in their settings.
Brainstorming to Find the Mismatches
Ms. Rivera meets with her mentor, Beatriz, for their biweekly coaching session as part of her professional development plan. Earlier in the week, Beatriz reviewed a video clip of the lollipop / rainbow interaction.
Beatriz: Could you describe what you observe? Ms. Rivera: She pointed to the wrong category. I corrected her and moved on. Beatriz: Let’ s look at that moment again. What was the most noticeable feature of that card? Ms. Rivera:( pauses) The rainbow, I guess. It’ s really colorful. Beatriz: So if you were a 4-year-old and you saw that picture for the first time, what might you have noticed? Ms. Rivera:( slowly responding) The rainbow. Oh. She wasn’ t wrong. She was just looking at something different.
When a mentor sits with a teacher, they can look together for the mismatches: A child said something unexpected, a child went quiet, or a response seemed off topic, and the teacher moved past it. Documentation is important because it helps record how teachers approached situations, shows what their next steps were, and generates ideas about where to go from there. In the vignette, Ms. Rivera’ s interaction with Laila was recorded, which
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