1. Good Listening Skills Attending skills A posture of involvement.
Eye contact
Non-distracting environment.
Posture: body language showing interest not disinterest. Students to provide suggestions.
Eye contact: Social/cultural sensitivity.
Environment: Ideally, conversation happens somewhere without distractions. If not, listener must concentrate on speaker & edit out distractions.

2. Good Listening Skills Following Skills Door openers
Minimal encouragers
Infrequent Questions
Attentive Silence
Door Openers: encourage the speaker to talk. Ask a question which requires more than a ‘yes/no’ answer.
Minimal encouragers: body language again – nod head in agreement etc. Students to provide other examples.
Infrequent questions – don’t ask questions constantly, only if the speaker needs to be encouraged back onto topic.
Attentive silence – sometimes speakers need time to think about what to say next. Short pauses are OK.

3. Good Listening Skills Reflecting Skills Paraphrasing
Reflecting feelings
Summative Reflections.
Reflecting means feeding back what you have heard. Discuss barriers to listening eg bias; environmental factors, such as noise, temperature and uncomfortable seating; short attention span; rehearsing a response; daydreaming.
Paraphrasing – When we use our own words to repeat back what we think the speaker has just communicated, we are clarifying their message “So, when x happened, then you did y?” This lets the speaker affirm what the listener said or explain their meaning in a different way
Reflecting feelings – “When that happened, you felt worried?”
Summative Reflections - More complex paraphrasing. Summarising the whole of the conversation, not just certain points.

4. Individual Activity
Write down what you believe your strengths and weaknesses in listening are at this point.
Write down a short term and/or long term goal in regards to improving your listening.

5. Group Activity Break up into groups of 3.
Person 1 will be the speaker, person 2 will be the listener, and person 3 will critique the listener. Try to speak on this topic for at least two minutes.
Topic for speakers: “The greatest challenge facing me in the transition from college to full time employment…”
Person 3 – feedback for person 1.
Rotate the tasks ...