Has this ever happened to you? You're engaged in a conversation with someone and despite the fact that they are making eye contact with you, you just have a feeling that they are not listening? Conversely, has your mind ever wandered off while listening to someone telling you about something that happened to them? And they follow it up with a question like: "How would you handle that situation if you were me?" or "What would you do if you were in my shoes?". And you then realize you have no idea how to answer them because you really weren't listening?
We posed this dilemma to our 3rd and 4th Graders with 2 goals in mind: 1 - Teaching the art of listening, and 2 - How to repair a conversation when our mind focuses on something else to the extent that we miss the gist of the conversation.
To accomplish goal #1, I engaged Marilena in a conversation about my relaxing weekend, with Marilena making eye contact with me in a way that made me feel that while she was looking at me, her mind was not on the conversation. The students agreed that her responses (or lack thereof) did not match the content of the conversation. She didn't nod her head in acknowledgement, nor did she smile when appropriate. Instead, her facial expressions and body language indicated a lack of presence to what I was saying. Indeed, when I asked her what I had said, she admitted that she had missed most of the conversation because she wasn't fully attending.
We then talked about some of the most important components of listening: being attentive, focusing on our partner, nodding with acknowledgement and reflecting the mood of the speaker.
With regard to goal number 2, we asked the students if they had ever been guilty of not fully listening when someone's talking. An example I gave was: "Suppose you are chatting with your friend but then you realize that you forgot your math homework and you are now preoccupied with the consequences of not having your homework to hand in! So you lose focus on what your friend is saying and they then ask you for a reaction to what they were saying! All of the students admitted that they were guilty of this at one time or another. How do we repair it? The students knew exactly what to do! One said that she would apologize to her friend for not attending, following up with the reason why, in this case, being worried about the forgotten homework. The others gave similar responses, indicating that they would take responsibility and follow it up with a sincere explanation.
They make me so proud!
Our final activity was a fun test of their listening skills. They had to listen to a partner read to them a series of activities and to perform them according to the sequence on the card. For example, one student was asked to: "Raise your hand and point to the ceiling, after you name the state you live in, but before you say your favorite food"!
At home, try some of these fun exercises as you talk about the importance of listening and its impact on friendship skills.Your children will amaze you!
