Active Listening Activities

Active listening activities aid in improving communication skills, making it possible for people to understand each other better, by training themselves to be better listeners which is an integral part of any successful interaction. Given here are active listening exercises that include active listening activities for students and adults.

In the world today, effective communication plays a major role in helping us to understand one another better. Any successful relationship and interaction between people depends a great deal on our ability to efficaciously convey our thoughts, ideas and emotions. Active listening has tremendous potential to improve a person’s communication skills, preparing him for any situation, be it a business meeting or an argument at home or school. Active listening activities train people to carefully and attentively listen to each other, without bias or distraction and empower them to fully understand what the other person is trying to say and what it really means. Active listening techniques include paying complete attention in order to distinguish between changes in voice intonations, looking for cues in facial expressions and body language to comprehend the other person’s point of view sans prejudices. Paying complete attention to the speaker helps ensure that there is no error in interpretation. Active listening is an integral part of effective communication techniques, developed by Thomas Gordon, a clinical psychologist, and is actually a part of the Gordon Model of Communication, which started out as a means to help improve parent-children relationships, but was then adapted for use in general and business situations as well. Read on to learn some free active listening activities that could greatly improve your ability to communicate.

Active Listening Activities For Students The importance of teaching youngsters the art of active listening cannot be denied. After all the future depends on them. A communication gap, also sometimes known as the generation gap, need not exist between adults and youngsters. Active listening activities can help remove this barrier that stands between youngsters and adults and help them to grasp ways to improve communication skills

better. It will also teach young people to express themselves more articulately. It will also aid them to be more understanding in their attitudes towards others and help them see and appreciate different people’s point of view, thus helping them mature into more responsible adults. Here are some active listening activities for students that can be used at home, at school or in any other children and youth gatherings or meetings.

Group Juggle

: This is a great activity that is suitable for all ages of students. It needs a large space as it also involves physical activity. The teacher can be participatory in this game. The activity requires the group to stand in a circle and then the teacher calls out someone’s name and passes a soft toy or a ball to that person, who in turn passes it to another pupil, after calling their name. This process continues and everybody gradually becomes alert in order to catch the ball immediately after their names are called out. The element of surprise will make them listen more carefully and watch out for their names. This will lead to a little confusion at first but will help everyone remember and listen carefully for all the names.

‘To be Continued…’

: This is an easy activity to improve active listening and requires a common topic to be given to the group on which one of the students begins to speak on. It could be a fun or easy topic at first, followed by more difficult ones. The teacher or supervisor can then suddenly stop the person in mid-sentence and ask the person next to the speaker to continue along the lines of the previous speaker’s last few sentences. This continues for some time and once everyone gets a hang of how it works, the supervisor can then pick anyone at random to continue speaking. This greatly improves listening and helps everyone to learn to carefully listen to the speaker.

The “Tell Your Story in a Line” Session

: For this activity, place the group in a line and let the persons at the two ends of the line pass on a 3 line story to the person next to him, who then passes it down the line. Thus, you will have two stories passing down from the two terminals of the line. Now ask the persons who are left in the end to narrate the final story that reached them. This active listening activity will help them understand the need of listening carefully to a message and how to go about reinterpreting in the most appropriate way.

Active Listening Activities for Adults These are some active listening exercises, that could be used for leadership training or in an office, for adults to enhance workplace communication

.

The “Were You Listening?” Quiz

: For this activity, each member of the group goes to the front of the room and is asked 3 questions about themselves or their likings, by the rest of the group members. The supervisors has to make a note of the answers given by each of the members. Then the group is told that they have a quiz, to see if they really listened to each other. The members have to then recall and identify which member had answered what. This will help them to understand the importance of listening to each other.

Active Listening Discussion: Divide the group into pairs and let each pair have a listener and a speaker. The speaker is then given a situation which he speaks on as the listener actively listens to him. After the speaker is done, the listener tries to rephrase the speech in the way he understood it and then tries to offer solutions or feedback to the speaker. They can then review each others performance and swap roles. This exercise helps improve the participant’s business communication

skills and ability to understand and work efficiently with each other.

Active listening activities thus, help in achieving a greater sense of understanding and improved communication between two parties and can be used in a number of situations by parents, teachers, students, businesspersons and employees to help foster better relationships and conflict resolution.