Active Listening & Non-Verbal Communication

Forms of non-verbal communication including body language, attitude and listening techniques are essential in showing students you care about what they have to say and value their thought process.

Michael H. Hoppe, author of Active Listening: Improve Your Ability to Listen and Lead, indentifies the six primary skills involved in active listening in the following excerpt from his book.

“Active listening involves six skills: paying attention suspending judgement, reflecting, clarifying, summarizing, and sharing. Each skill contributes to the active listening mind-set, and each skill includes various techniques or behaviors. These skills are not mutually exclusive. For example, paying attention isn’t something you stop doing when you suspend judgement. Nor are the skills consistently weighted in importance. In one conversation, clarifying may take much effort and time; in another conversation, gaining clarity and understanding may be quick and easy.”

To read more on each of the six skills, follow the link in the Resources tab to get access to the full eBook.

READ the following article on the basics of good listening from the Harvard Business Review or watch the video below:

Video: What is Active Listening?

Sandra E. Spataro and Janel Bloch discuss the effects of active listening in their article  “‘Can You Repeat That?’ Teaching Active Listening in Management Education.” 

READ the following excerpt to see how they define active listening

Overall, “The goal in active listening is to develop a clear understanding of the speaker’s concern and also to clearly communicate the listener’s interest in the speaker’s message” (McNaughton, Hamlin, McCarthy, Head-Reeves, & Schreiner, 2008, p. 224). While there are many representations of what comprises active listening, a recent synthesis by Weger et al. (2010), based on Rogers’ (1951) seminal work on empathic listening, provides a useful characterization of this skill. Weger et al. (2010) define active listening as having three essential elements: (1) the listener’s nonverbal involvement, indicating full attention; (2) the listener reflecting the speaker’s message back to the speaker; and (3) the listener questioning the speaker to encourage elaboration and further details. Specific behavioral components of active listening include paraphrasing, focusing on both the content and how it is being delivered, exerting significant effort as a participant in the conversation, communicating attentiveness through body language, and maintaining eye contact (Pearce, Johnson, & Barker, 1995).

To read the rest of the article, you may go to the work cited entry at the bottom of this page and click on the link. 

READ the PDF below, which was created by the Center for Student Success. It covers the basics of active listening within the context of a tutoring session

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