Lesson 8- Active Listening

Welcome back to the eighth installment of our Coping Power Classroom video series!

Your students have been practicing a range of different thought, behavior, and relaxation-based coping skills to develop self-control, regulate their emotions, and better respond to difficult situations. Your students have been practicing a range of different thought, behavior, and relaxation-based coping skills to develop self-control, regulate their emotions, and better respond to difficult situations.

Now that they've built these coping skills, they will begin exploring how to re-enter and effectively resolve the conflicts and stressors that they face in their everyday lives, both at school and outside of school.

Active listening is the next step students are learning in effectively PICC-ing apart a problem. To do this, your students are learning and practicing these strategies such as picking up on emotional cues from gestures and facial expressions, making eye contact, avoiding distractions, asking questions,  and summarizing what was said to them. Students are learning that all of these strategies show interest and attention towards the speaker. They will practice with peers so that they can determine the difference between active listening and not active listening, and they should begin to recognize how much better it feels to speak to someone when they are listening actively. All of this is intended to continue building those perspective taking and empathy skills.

Some, if not all, of these active listening skills are likely new to students in your classroom, and they can be challenging skills to develop, especially in a world of constant distractions. This lesson introduces skills, provides animated examples, and discussion opportunities prior to expecting them to engage in active listening to help them get more comfortable with the strategies overall.

Since active listening skills take time to develop, we encourage you to practice regularly with your class through this week’s challenge task. Focus on finding times when you can help your students apply active listening strategies both in their own lives and in the stories and experiences of others. For example, you can model active listening when one of your students is talking to you about a problem to demonstrate what active listening looks like. You can even have them reflect on how they felt after having someone listen actively to their problem.

If students are facing a conflict or challenge in a situation at lunch, on the playground, etc., you could also guide them through actively listening to the other student’s experience of the interaction.

Best of luck practicing and developing this new strategy! We’ll see you next week.