Lisa Dresdner

Teaching and Learning

Active Listening: Small Group Activity

We live in a noisy world, where a commotion of sounds and distractions clamor for our attention. The result, says Julian Treasure in a recent TED Talk, is that we are “losing our listening.” Listening is a skill, which requires both attention and intention, but most of us would agree that many students could use some reinforcement.

 Teaching students to listen will not only help them to succeed in class, but it will also lead them to a deeper engagement with their world. Deep listening is a radical act: it starts with our ears—making sense of words as well as of the speaker’s tone—and it also involves our eyes, because body language can say a lot. Most importantly, though, deep listening requires that we push the MUTE button on our internal commentary. And this last step is probably one of the hardest to do, in part because rather than truly listen to what another says, we too often merely hear a word or an idea that connects with something we want to say. The old proverb that states, “We have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak,” would be more accurate if it explained that the reason for two ears and one mouth is that it’s twice as hard to listen as it is to talk. 

The following is a simple activity I do with students several times throughout the semester when I want them to explore specific topics. Before putting them into small groups of 4 or 5, I review the following guidelines: 

  • Listen with openness: suspend your judgments and biases and listen for those things with which you agree as well as those you might challenge.
  • Listen with curiosity: engage your desire to learn, rather than to try to “fix” anything.
  • Listen without asking questions that interrupt the speaker: jot down your questions if necessary and save them for later.
  • Listen for patterns and for what is not being said.

here are only two RULES:

  1. Each person must speak once before anyone can speak a second (or third) time.
  2. If someone asks a question, someone else must answer it before another comment can be made.

Step One: Identify a group leader who will make sure the rules are followed.

Step Two: One person begins by saying something about the topic; the others listen attentively and intentionally.

Step Three: Another individual asks a follow up question or comments about what s/he heard.

Repeat Steps Two and Three until everyone has spoken at least twice, or for a specific amount of time.

Step Four: The group leader, with help from the group, summarizes the conversation and identifies any patterns or insights that emerged and developed.

I often follow this activity with a reflective journal entry, where students reveal their surprise at how difficult it is to listen actively. But after doing this activity several times, they discover that they are becoming better listeners in many areas of their lives. 

 

Copyright © 2014 Lisa Dresdner, all rights reserved.