BubbleUp Take 5: Listening, Power, Audiobooks, Coding, & the ever mysterious Teen Brain

Summer is finally here for everyone in our Bubbleup Community. Hooray! We hope you are well on your way to finding time to reflect, recharge and re-imagine. Start by taking 5 minutes to check out this week's Take5. We take a closer look at a variety of topics related to teaching, learning and working within a school community.
​

---

Originally shared by Gretchen Rubin (if you are regular readers of this blog you know that we are Gretchen Rubin super fans), this article titled Effective Listening for Leaders addresses the importance of listening well, a discussion of the challenges, and tips for becoming a better listener, and thereby a better leader.

Every one of us has likely had a moment in which we wondered about the decisions of an administrator, manager, boss or someone else in a position of authority. A recent piece in the Harvard Business Review offers 5 Questions to Ask Before you Call out Someone Powerful.

If you work with teens or live with teens (or even ever encounter teens out in the world), you've probably wondered "what the heck were they thinking?" A post on Mindful.org, The Amazing, Tumultuous, Wild, Wonderful, Teenage Brain, written by Dr. Dan Siegel, the author of the book Brainstorm, helps shed light on the adolescent brain, how it works, and the tremendous value of this stage of development.

If you teach, you encounter kids who have difficulty reading. This article from KQED's MindShift entitled "How audiobooks can help kids who struggle with reading," discusses not only the relevance of using audiobooks in classrooms but the why behind how audiobooks improve reading skills. The article is a powerful tool in favor of the use of audiobooks in homes and America's classrooms.

Have you used Code.org in your classroom? Your school? How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding into American Classrooms is about the motives and reasons behind the Hour of Code -- a program that has been utilized by more than 100 million students. As teachers we often consider the usefulness of tools for our students but perhaps not the intentions behind the creators of tech tools. It's worth staying in the know and thinking about not only pedagogy but also the goal of the developers.