How to Teach Effective Listening Skills

Learning to listen benefits students and their teachers.

Teaching students to listen effectively is best achieved by teaching them how to listen actively. Learning by listening benefits students and teachers in many ways. Students benefit through keener understanding and ideally better grades. Teachers benefit with less frustration at having to constantly repeat instructions. Effective listening transfers to the real world, too, and in this sense has multiple benefits for students.

Things You'll Need

• Notebooks

Instructions

1. Discuss the rules of active listening with students as a whole class. Rules: While the speaker speaks, the others do not, and only listen. No asking questions until the speakers finish speaking. Take down notes to help remember. Write down any questions to ask when the speaker finishes. Face the speaker as you listen.

2. Place students in two rows facing each other. Instruct one row to discuss a funny event that happened to them in the past week, while the other row just listens, without speaking. One row will be speakers, the other row will be the listeners.

3. Instruct listeners to get out their notebooks to take notes and write down questions as they listen. This is the "active" part of active listening.

4. Instruct students to speak for two minutes, no more.

5. Have the listener row immediately repeat what they heard from the speakers using "I heard" statements. If they have questions, they must phrase their questions beginning with "I" statements, such as "I want to know...." Or "I wondered about...."

6. Instruct speakers to give listeners feedback on how they did as listeners and in repeating back what was said, how much they remembered about the funny story. Listeners will use this feedback in a follow-up discussion later to see how they did as active listeners.

7. Instruct the rows to change their roles, with the listener row becoming speakers, and the speakers becoming listeners. Repeat the process. Remind listeners to take out their notebooks to take notes.

8. Have a discussion with students about what makes a good listener. Ask them about the things they did well and better as listeners through the activity, and what they didn't do as listeners. Get feedback from speakers about how their listeners did in remembering information.

Tips & Warnings

• Repeat the process a few times to allow students an opportunity to see how their listening became more effective with successive rounds. Ideally, repeating and practicing the process will improve their listening, and they'll transfer it to all other areas that require listening.

References

• Skills for Active Listening
• Readwritethink: Strategy Guide
• Learning Through Listening