Active Listening

Open, Active Listening

All effective communication starts with understanding others. The ability to openly and actively listen to others is the most important and crucial skill for humans throughout life and in almost all situations. The ability to do this with our children and students is the foundation of all guidance and the solution to many management problems.

Parents and teachers often ask, “How do I get children to listen and do what I tell them to do?”  In his very influential book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey stresses how important it is to “Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood”. (Covey, 1989).

Seeking to understand implies an intention to really see and accept the speaker.  It requires us to be empathetic and open. This allows us to create the relationships that invite and almost guarantee that the other will listen and care about what we communicate with them. Unfortunately, we don’t do this very well, especially with children, whom we sometimes don’t acknowledge as unique individuals with equal rights.

This ability to listen deeply is a learnable skill, but one most of us were never taught. Even those of us with graduate-level training in a field where this skill is practiced constantly are still in the process of becoming better at doing this. My fervent hope is that you will commit to growing in this skill by learning and utilizing the skills presented in this chapter.

The term Active Listening was introduced in the 1950s and refers to a communication technique that involves fully focusing, understanding, responding to, and remembering what is being said. (Rogers & Farson, 1957) We will be diving in to learn all of these important skills over the next several sections. There are active listening guidelines to help support your learning with practical application. You may also want to review the active listening techniques for later use.

General Points About Active Listening

The intention of this kind of listening has to be pure. The intention has to be solely to understand. Often, in guiding children, we have agendas and goals, behavior, and things we want children to do. Understanding does not mean that any appropriate limits have to be breached or that a particular behavior not in the child’s or other’s best interests has to be accepted. What must be accepted are the feelings being expressed. And before you turn to what will happen next, you have to be able to understand the child’s point of view in order to effectively choose your response as well as help them deal with their situation.

This kind of listening has to be done from a perspective of equality and mutual respect. One of the activities I have done in class to help students realize the importance of level communication is to ask half of them to stand on desks (sturdy ones that are safe) and talk with a partner who is standing in front of them on the ground about something like where they would choose to go on an ideal vacation. The whole experience of looking down on someone or craning your neck to look up at the person you’re talking to creates amazing differences in their conversation. Those looking up felt inhibited and reserved, while those looking down on their partner often found themselves feeling and sounding condescending.

Listening should always be done at eye level. Most often, with children, we kneel or squat down to their level. The setting can also be important. The goal is to eliminate the dynamics of power imbalances. The speaker needs to feel empowered to share openly. It can feel very different, for example, when having a conference with a parent when the teacher and parent can just sit in a couple of same-sized chairs facing each other rather than the teacher sitting behind a desk and the parent in a child’s chair in front.

Eye contact is not necessarily always needed for this kind of listening. What eye contact often conveys is that the listener is completely focused on the speaker, which is always necessary and important. Research has shown, however, that parents listening to their teenagers is most effective while driving in a car because the setting creates a low-pressure, side-by-side environment where teens feel more comfortable opening up. (Dworkin & Larson, 2006) (Steinberg, 2014)

Body language is critical. The optimal posture is usually facing each other a comfortable distance apart in an open body position. Legs and arms should not be crossed. Although, as mentioned above, eye contact is not always necessary, it can be very helpful for several reasons. It can communicate that you are focused on the speaker. It also allows you to pick up on all the body language that is being communicated that can greatly affect the meaning of the words spoken.

Facial expression is a very powerful way to communicate understanding. As your mirror neurons are activated by the perceived emotion of the speaker, your face easily sends messages of that understanding and caring. This can be very powerful for the speaker to see.

Simple head nods or words like “Oh”, “Wow,” and “Hmm” can communicate that you are there with them and interested without interrupting what they’re saying.

Paraphrasing

The key skill used in active listening is reflecting back what the speaker has said. There are many reasons why this is so effective. First, it lets the speaker know that you heard what they said. It also allows mistakes or misunderstandings to be resolved easily. Thirdly, it can help the speaker clarify for themselves what they are saying and stay on track in continuing to share what they want you to know. It allows them to hear for themselves what they are communicating to you.

When we train peer mediators (students who are trained to help others resolve conflicts), they are taught to always repeat back what each person says continuously throughout the process. This accomplishes the above-mentioned goals, and it also allows the other person to hear the information from a neutral person a second time, which can be very useful.

Paraphrasing is NOT parroting back, word for word, what is said in a robotic way. This can be very annoying and, more importantly, can convey to the speaker a lack of interest or involvement on your part. By paraphrasing in your own words what you heard, the speaker knows that you have not only got the meaning of what was said but have actively processed what was said as well.

Reflecting Feelings

Feelings, whether verbalized or not, are very often the all-important heart of messages that are being sent, especially in the area of guidance. Reflecting and letting the speaker know that you understand the feelings that are being expressed is crucial.

Listening for Attachment

Attachment is a term that describes an emotional bond, initially between an infant and their primary caregiver and later in life between intimate partners or continuing relationships with family or close friends. The process of wondering and reflecting back what we sense the emotions are in a child can almost be like magic. When we get it right, at that moment, the child senses that there is someone else who “gets it”. It’s like you’ve reached inside them and put a label on this internal experience that only they know.

When we are fully listening, our perception of emotions in another person triggers “mirror neurons” in our own brain that give us a taste of that emotional experience. This allows us to be empathetic. When this child sees the adult and senses that this adult is feeling something also, the child gets to experience themselves being felt by another person. They can literally see that their emotions matter to someone else, that THEY matter to someone else. This creates an emotional bond that allows these feelings that are almost unbearable in isolation to be bearable.

This process allows the child to calm down and become able to use their own self-regulation and problem-solving skills. When someone is listened to in this deep way, an observer can easily see the tension and other manifestations of the emotion in the body of the speaker just melt away. This is so important in managing behavior. This process of calming that is so obvious in the body also has an important neural component. High emotions trigger an automatic response from the limbic system (the parts of the brain that deal with emotions) that can actually shut down part of the functioning in the cerebral cortex (the decision-making, thinking part of our brain). We’re literally “not thinking” when our emotions have “hijacked the captain”, the front part of our brain. I’m sure you can all recall an incident of doing something when you were emotionally activated that you regretted when you calmed down.

The Process of Reflecting Feelings

No one can absolutely “know” what someone else is feeling. All we can do is “guess” based on what we’re hearing and seeing as well as what our mirror neurons are suggesting. All of our reflecting back needs to be tentative. Great ways to communicate your understanding of the feeling being expressed can start with:

• “Seems like…..”
• “Looks like…..”
• “Sounds like…..”
• “That could be…..”

As an example, if a child said, “The bus driver made fun of me for being late and everybody on the bus laughed at me,” a good response could be, “Sounds like you were embarrassed by what happened.” Or “That could be really embarrassing.” Notice how different those feel from being told, “You were embarrassed by them laughing at you.” By being tentative, you show respect for the independence and sovereignty of the person’s feelings while also showing that you understand. It also allows for guessing mistakes to be easily corrected by the speaker.

Also, notice that the responses above focus on just what’s really important. The child  doesn’t need to hear, “That could be really embarrassing to be laughed at by everyone on the bus after the driver made fun of you for being late.” Short and simple is always better.

Using an appropriate feeling word to describe what you think the speaker is feeling is very useful for a number of reasons. In the above example, for instance, if the speaker wasn’t really feeling embarrassed as much as really angry at the driver for their behavior, they would be able to consider that and respond with, “No, I was just mad that the driver could do that. It seemed like he was purposefully trying to get everyone to laugh at me.”

For younger children especially, using appropriate feeling words allows them to build a vocabulary to help them better understand their own experiences. For example, a student who doesn’t know the vocabulary for milder forms of anger might not be able to manage those feelings until they grow into a more intense state when their limbic system pushes them into a reaction. If a student has had annoyance or irritation acknowledged by a caring adult in the past, he may be able to recognize and name it and then use that knowledge to tell a student who is tapping a pencil loudly, “That sound is annoying. I can’t concentrate.” Without that knowledge, the emotion can grow to a level of anger that ends in inappropriate behavior.

References

1. Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 habits of highly effective people: Powerful lessons in personal change. Free Press.
2. Dworkin, J., & Larson, R. (2006). Adolescents’ negative experiences in organized activities: Perspectives across three nations. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 16(1), 1-22.
3. Steinberg, L. (2014). Age of opportunity: Lessons from the new science of adolescence. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.