We all think we know how to listen but listening fully is a skill that often takes a good couple of years of practice to get really good at.

Listening involves multiple skills and awareness. We don’t normally use this awareness in day-to-day situations and a lot of people struggle to listen as they find it hard to let go of thinking ‘what do I say next’ or worrying about how to respond.

Listening skills are mainly taught in counselling and psychotherapy training settings and normally take a year to complete. Anyone who is working 1:1 with children and adults should study listening skills as much as they can.

It is important not to confuse listening skills with actual counselling or therapy. Counsellors, and therapists in training will learn and practice listening skills before they go on to learn counselling and therapy skills. Counselling and therapy skills are, in a nutshell, drawing out deeper emotions and thoughts and either helping someone process them or changing the impact of them in some way. You will not be drawing out deeper emotions or creating interventions to change your student’s feelings and thoughts. Instead, you are aiming to show your student you understand how they feel about something, which will create a strong connection and a shared direction.

In this chapter of our course, we will go over the listening skills that will help you as a tutor to really understand and communicate that understanding to your student. If you have a student that feels understood by you, you will be able to tutor them with ease as they will want to work with you in what we call ‘alignment’.

Alignment means: when people work together and have an agreement on the task or goal. This can be a shared feeling and understanding as well as attitude and motivation.

The skills we are about to work from are adaptions from Michael Jacobs (2000) book, Swift to Hear.

Listen with undivided attention and without interrupting.

This can be difficult to do for many reasons. The undivided attention implies focusing on things beyond what the student is saying, such as worrying their talking means that too much of the lesson time is being wasted. Don’t worry about the lesson time going by, listening to a student and allowing them to feel understood will create an alliance that will speed all future learning up.

You will know the difference between a student who is talking as a distraction technique to get out of learning and a student who is saying how they feel about learning for the first time.

Anxiety about what to say and how to reply can also cause a distraction. As tutors it’s your job to make educated changes and interventions to move the learning forward. So, stopping and listening is not something you would normally do. It may feel strange at first.

Anxiety about what to say or trying to ‘do something’ with what you are listening to is known as internal noise. internal noise can also be things we all suffer from at time to time, such as being tired or hungry.

However your Internal noise will be loud if you have expectations of how a student may be feeling. You might unintentionally only hear what you are expecting to hear. Try and keep an open mind and remain curious with every student to avoid this.

External noises such as distractions from the outside will also affect your ability to listen. Many counsellors and therapists need to work in relative silence to home in on listening skills. Simple things such as doors shutting and closing, traffic noises and muffled voices can hamper the enhanced listening skills they have. Undivided   attention is about letting everything go and just listening to what’s being said.

Listen to the baseline of what’s not being said.

There may be more than one emotion, a child may feel angry about not being able to read and ashamed at the same time. Emotions are often confusing and conflicting. It’s conflicting feelings that cause people to struggle and this struggle can cause stress and conflicting feeling to become intense and uncomfortable within a person.

The baseline is often never expressed clearly. A student will rarely say ‘I don’t like reading as it makes me feel worthless’ they will probably say something like ‘I don’t like reading it’s boring’.

The emotional tone of what’s being said is trying to be hidden but that feeling of worthlessness is going to dictate a slow pace in the lessons, unless one day that worthlessness can be expressed and listened to. Once it’s been said it won’t have the same power and learning will be quicker and more possible.

You hear the baseline of how people feel when they contradict themselves, when they make throw away comments and when they try and brush things aside. The base line is what’s going on inside them, it’s hard to hear at first but, with practice, hearing what is not being said becomes easier.

Watch for non-verbal clues to help with the baseline.

Non-verbal cues are the key to hearing the baseline. For example, your student may have their head held down reflecting shame when faced with a maths problem or difficult spellings. Look closely at their body language and try to see what is being said.

Shaking objects is also a baseline sign. Perhaps they are frustrated, unsure or feeling impatient. Ask yourself and your student if they are ok and wait to see if they say anything. Other non-verbal cues could include clenching paper and gripping pens.

Some students will suppress their feelings due to social desirability, a need to please or fear of being told off or criticised. You probably won’t be able to really hear your students until a few lessons in, when they can trust you. Repeated listening and tuning in to your students will help you really listen to what is happing for each student when they are learning. We can’t suppress our feelings for long without feeling uncomfortable or getting stressed.

Increase empathy.

Sometimes you may want to disclose something about your life or your personal experiences with learning as a way of connecting but, instead of sharing your story to show you understand, use it to understand the student’s feelings.

Disclosure is good in respect of building connection so the child can get to know you but not as way of identifying a child’s feelings. Telling a student that you like making models or you like riding your bike in the rain is one thing, but telling a student you struggled to spell because you can see they are struggling isn’t letting the child articulate their feelings.

Disclosure so the child can get to know you should always be limited to the odd thing. The student needs to get to ‘experience you’ not ‘know you’. By experience I mean that you are not going to make them feel bad if they get something wrong, that you want to help them and won’t scare them with tests all the time and that you respect them rather than just give them orders.

Listening happens best when the student has a good experience, you will support them and you are safe. Too much disclosure and you lessen their experience.

However, disclosure will stop you hearing and listening. Each time you talk you can’t hear, it’s that simple.

If a student is saying something that is triggering you to think of a time you felt overwhelmed, disheartened or any other negative memory to do with learning, instead of telling the student about your experience and then telling them how you got ever it, just use that memory trigger to understand how the student might be feeling and reflect it back.

Tommy is doing his spellings and you suddenly think back to a time you were scared about doing a maths test, you felt nervous and thought you were going to get in trouble.

‘I wonder if this list of spellings is making you worry about getting any wrong?’

Then just listen to the response.

The use of ‘I wonder’. I wonder is one of the best couple of words if you are guessing at a student’s feelings about their learning. I wonder is miles are from say ‘you are’. You are not telling a student how they feel, you are simply sharing that you ‘wonder’. That way the student is free to agree, or say you are wrong. I wonder is a gentle way of starting any emotional conversation.

Try to tolerate pauses and manage silences for longer.

Students who are sharing their feelings will need time to respond and so, to hear the base line in students’ expressions, you must be silent and that may take a pause and a silence. This can be uncomfortable for a lot of people. Counsellors and therapists can take years to learn how to tolerate silences and not feel like they have to say something to stop the situation from being awkward.

Avoid changing the subject or getting back to the lesson too soon.

Doing so may connect to a fear of needing to get back on task. Many tutors feel anxious that they are not being good tutors if they stop and listen to the students opening up. This anxiety, or fear of not being a good tutor can cause the tutor to shut the conversation down and request a focus is on the educational task instead. Once you can show a student you have listened and you understand how they feel, they will get back to the task very quickly and work harder in future lessons.

It is true that tutoring is not all listening and we are not providing mental health support or emotional support in isolation. You should not be conducting every lesson listening to the student who is sat next to you, but spending some time listening is crucial to building a relationship.

Students need time to process how they feel. They may even come back to something later on in the lesson or begin to open up more several lessons later. Try not to force listening by forcing the student to open up before they are ready. Some students may never open up, so unfortunately there will be the odd few who you never be able to build a connection with.

Avoid replying with a lecture / monologue.

It’s common to think that once a student has told you about how they feel or opened up in some way that you need to turn this in to a teaching moment. Invariably this begins with a mini lecture or monologue designed to make the student feel better, rather than just listen to their feelings.

However, lectures and ‘you should’ monologues cut across being understood and will shut down any further communication on such a level. You can’t show someone you understand them or that you can hear them and genuinely want to know about them if you are turning it into a lecture moment.

Listening isn’t about making people feel better by changing their minds or reframing their core beliefs about themselves, it is just listening to what’s being said without interruption, judgement, or expectations.

Students need to be seen and understood. If it feels like you need to do something to make it better, then you have moved past listening. However, knowing and understanding how they feel about learning means a student will feel safe enough with you to be vulnerable and learn in the contexts of how they feel.

As I have mentioned many times, enabling a student to talk while you listen will build an alliance that will make a strong tutor / tutee relationship that will cover a lot of educational ground and make substantial progress.

In future courses we will practice listening skills and how you can reflect back on these skills.

References:

Jacobs, M. (2000) Swift to hear : facilitating skills in listening and responding. London, Spck.