Complex Listening: Supporting Students to Listen As Mathematical Sense-makers

Participating in reform-oriented mathematical discussion calls on teachers and students to listen to one another in new and different ways. However, listening is an understudied dimension of teaching and learning mathematics. In this analysis, we draw on a sociocultural perspective and a conceptual framing of three types of listening—evaluative, interpretive, and hermeneutic (Davis, 1996, 1997)—in order to interpret the listening interactions in a fourth-grade classroom. Using interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) to pay close attention to how participants responded to one another during a carefully selected lesson segment, findings reveal that these students listened in complex ways with explicit support from their teacher. From this revelatory case, we offer a framework for understanding the teacher’s role in supporting complex listening.