“This school is worse than Bosnia,” Terry, my old principal said, a month after he had returned from nine months Reserve duty in that war-torn country. His school had become “mean-spirited,” almost violent, with huge increases in suspensions, detentions and absentees. He was seeking my help; since I had left teaching at his middle school I had become an award winning mediator and peacemaker in the community and might have a few tricks up my sleeve.
We gathered the school community around, representatives of parents, teachers, community members and students, and held a fishbowl conversation about what was going wrong in the school. I just listened as they each shared similar stories of how marginalized and unimportant they had been treated, how frustrating it was to get heard, how mean some people were when they tried to share their ideas. Everyone from the top administrator down to the sixth grader felt this way.
At Listening Planet we help couples hear each other.
“No one is listening to one another, Terry. Let’s teach the whole school how to listen.”
So we rounded up dedicated mediators from the local community mediation services, found a bit of money, set up in the corner of the counselors lobby and set about teaching the whole school listening skills. We built what was to become one of the longest running and most successful peer mediation and whole school listening programs in the state.
At the end of those 7 months we looked at the school’s progress: over all altercations, suspensions, detentions and absenteeism had been reduced by 63%! We couldn’t claim full responsibility for that, but we sure helped. We, Listening Planet, then Listening House, stayed in the school for three more years, and the program, started in 1999 is still running successfully. I train the new mediators every spring.
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Other schools wanted varying degrees of this program. I went all the states of Oregon and Washington like little Marci Listening Seed dropping ears with hearts in them. One day, a week into a stint in an elementary school in Clackamas County, OR, I was walking down the hall to the 2nd grade classroom and saw two little boy heads peering out of the doorway. “Quick, get inside, here comes the Listening Lady!” And the title stuck.
Since incorporating in 2002 as Listening Planet, we have been in schools, churches, prisons, rehab centers, businesses, government offices, homes, convention centers teaching what now amount to about 14,000 people how to listen to one another. Over the years I have adapted and created numerous workshops and materials which can be read about on our workshops page, designed and published the Listening Cards, and designed and implemented the first Listening Salon in our home city, Vancouver, WA.
This year Astara Jobson, one of my favorite former students and actors from Stages Youth Drama Project (a youth theater program I ran for 10 years), joined the Listening Planet efforts with me, and enhanced the vision and the way we operate organizationally and interpersonally. We call her my “Right Ear.” She has always been a force of nature. She is intuitive, intelligent and more left-brained than me, so she has helped me pull together all the pieces of the previous 10 years. She has video taped our Listening Salons, runs our books, makes sales of The Listening Cards in stores, and maintained our youtube site. She is herself a yoga teacher, a process work genius, and an intuitive body worker and reader. She has designed and is teaching workshops for us in our studio, “Listening to the Body.”
Together with you, we aim to get a million people this next year to begin improving their listening skills through our growing online school of communication skills, sales of The Listening Cards, the spread of Listening Salons and workshops. We also have 8 more decks of cards that pertain to listening in the hopper.
Keep an ear to the ground…
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