Skill Review: Mindful Classroom Conversations

Mindful Classroom Conversations is an interactive skill designed by Pedagogics Coaching Group, LLC to offer a unique educational experience for educators and teacher aspirants. Created with multiple conversation choices, this skill attempts to encourage a sense of empathy and courageous compassion by drawing the listener into distressing situations faced by the student named Chloe. The narration is crafted to inspire the user of this skill to understand and share Chloe’s experiences through mindful listening, and then answer questions by making meaningful choices.

To help educators and teacher aspirants alike, Mindful Classroom Conversations is built around a condensed storyline focusing on different levels of understanding and empathy. The dialogue, in general, seems to be crafted well enough to guide the listener to consciously appreciate or acknowledge Chloe’s emotions and respond with sensible choices to help her out. The skill starts with a brief story of a student struggling with a high-stakes test. As the conversation progresses, the listener gets the opportunity to be the voice teacher and offer empathetic responses to the student caught up in the difficult situation. The engaging narration offers the user the chance to brainstorm multiple points of view and offer an impactful resolution. The conversation alters based on the choices made by the user. Since the outcome is totally dependent on how the listener responds, it is expected of the user to analyze the situation in compassionate empathy before pronouncing a decision to benefit the most from the skill. The voice app encourages the user to make use of the Habits of Mind of “Listening with Understanding and Empathy” to make a successful resolution. A few other positives being, the user gets specific feedback along with the option to redo the story and explore different choices as well as the convenience to resume from where left off. That being said, there are a couple of downsides, namely the lack of diverse storylines, variety of story endings, and happy outcomes.

The VOGO Voice team scores this skill 4.6 out of 5 stars based on our rating system. Yet, you’ll have to try for yourself and see if it is truly an educational voice app grounded in empathic expression. So would-be teachers and budding to maturing educators, here’s the chance for you to learn and explore mindful conversations to build more empathic environments across classrooms. On that account, why not try out the skill and see if it offers the illuminating experience you had anticipated.