Monica Brady-Myerov has created a wonderful educational platform that teaches students to improve their listening using audio stories that cover content standards in Science, ELA, and Social Studies. She and her team have refined Listenwise over the years to precisely measure students and their progress at mastering eight key listening skills. With the recent inclusion of the Lexile Framework for Listening, I expect this area to increase in educational importance. California is one of 22 states that assess listening on their annual tests. Listening is especially important to English Learners who will make up one out of every four public school students by 2025. The combination of reading and listening builds their second language proficiency faster. Students gain confidence in their pronunciation when they hear the words spoken correctly.

Monica describes what she has learned along the way. She covers topics like storytelling, listening skills, how to teach listening, the connections between listening and reading, the benefits of listening for English Learners, assessing listening, and creating podcasts. In short, good listeners become great communicators. Peppered with personal stories, lessons, activities, reflection prompts, and planning tools; this book is a must for all interested in improving their communication skills. The author shines when she elaborates on her life-long love affair with the intimacy of audio and when advising teachers not to underestimate the impact of using their voices to read to students at any age. What does a future driven by voice-activated artificial intelligence sound like? Alexa, Siri, and Google have all read this book and so should you.

When I first started using Listenwise in my classroom, I noticed that almost every high school student would reach for their phone as soon as I hit play on the audio. However, when I prompted them on how important it was to listen intently and with 100% focus, their test scores started soaring. Typically, I read between 30-40 books per year. During the last year, with the pandemic, I learned how easy it was to get distracted and only read 6 books. This shameful fact reveals how dependent I have become on listening to books in the car. This book is already helping me sit down, tune out distractions, and put my focus back on reading every day. Still, I wish there was an audio version.