Activity Active Listening – please read the entire document before beginning.

Active listening is a skill that can be used all of your life in both personal and professional relationships.  It is critical that you are able to be an active listener during our class discussions because your ability to listen will influence your ability to contribute to and learn from class discussion.  The following exercise is designed to introduce you to active listening and give you the opportunity to practice this important skill.

In active listening, one person speaks while the other person listens for both content and feelings.  You will be divided up into pairs and each person in the pair will take a turn at both speaking and listening.

1. First, the speaker must choose a topic to talk about.  It can be about your hopes for the class, topics covered in the class that you are interested in or personal interests for example you stamp collection.  You may talk about personal interests such as hobbies, but please avoid private issues such as family problems, issues of mental health or your romantic experiences.  Don’t talk about any subject that you don’t want the entire class to know about.
2.  The speaker must try to communicate about the topic as precisely as she/he can.  Think about what you are saying.  In counseling, clients may be encouraged to free associate, but in class we are practicing to participate in class discussion.
3. The speaker should pause after about 3-4 sentences to allow the listener to respond.
4. The listener has three choices.  He/she can:
   1. Paraphrase – summarizing the person’s words to check understanding
   2. Invite clarification – asking client to say more
   3. Reflect feelings – mirror the person’s feelings through body language and words “that sounds frustrating”
   4. In class, I will also invite you to comment or add information, but here I want you to practice these three skills.

Becoming a better listener will help you to make better contributions to class discussions because in order for you to make a coherent contribution to class discussion you must connect your contribution to other students comments.  Students learn best from coherent class discussions.