- Anticipate questions one might want to ask.
- Anticipate answers to questions one might have to answer.
One of the assumptions that can be easy to make is that students know how to listen in a classroom situation. Do they? Have they ever actually been taught how to listen? Have they had deliberate practice with respect to listening? Have they ever had feedback and coaching on how they listen? We don’t think so. To become an effective and efficient learner, a student must learn how to listen. If they do not know how to listen, an instructor’s verbal delivery is akin to the sound of one hand clapping.
Learning to listen effectively will help the students when they are on co-op, doing an internship, and upon graduation. Listening is important in any relationship or situation.
The following is based on the student manual website and summarizes the advice that we give students about how to improve their listening. As an instructor, you also have to listen to students! How effective and efficient is your own listening?
Many of the points came from a workshop for actors we attended on how to read and understand Shakespeare; the actor needs to interpret and understand what Shakespeare intended: the emotion, the body language, the speed of speech, etc. The actors are taught to look for sequences, at the adjectives, and think about each word and its meaning, relationship to the words around it, and the relationship to the whole.
Shakespeare does not tell you what is funny, happy, sad, ironic, monumental, or sarcastic, you have to figure it out. This is the same with listening. It all comes down to the words and the patterns of words. Not all words are important. You want to hear and understand the words you should hear and understand.