10 Important Skills for Active Listening

January, 2015
Listening is an important skill that, unfortunately, is not given its due worth in school curricula. Listening is the key to understanding, a better understanding. It is a way of communicating and appreciating the world around us. The kind of listening am talking about here is what sound expert Julian Treasure called conscious listening. This is a mental process that consciously receives and decode auditory input. Stephen Covey talks about empathic listening (from empathy) and listed it as the fifth habit of highly effective  people. Empathic listening according to Stephen is an entirely different kind of listening; 'it is listening with the intent to understand, to really understand'. He added "empathic listening gets inside another person's frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel." (p. 251 in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People).

Given the important of active listening as an integral learning skill, here is a very good chart featuring some  handy listening activities and skills you can share with your students. This chart which I learned through this EdTech board is based on the work of  Storytelling and User Experience.

Check out an enlarged format of this chart from this link.

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