Tag Archives: listening

Feb 2 2015

Adults cannot learn to listen better; you are born with that skill or acquire it at a very early age.

???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Adults cannot learn to listen better; you are born with that skill or acquire it at a very early age. Under the title “What’s been did and what’s been hid,” that is the seventh of 12 truisms that have influenced how I have been doing my work as a learning and performance consultant over a number of years. I hope you will feel free to support it with a book reference, a personal experience or a case study, or knock it down using similar sources of evidence.

I confess that I believe you can teach people to listen better. But let me play Devil’s Advocate. It is not difficult to find courses on listening skills. Maybe their popularity is due to the fact that they are easy to design and run, and it is hard to detect no difference when people go back to work and nothing changes. So my question today is can adults learn to listen better, or is listening just a skill you are born with or at a very early age? No doubt course providers believe that learners can be taught to improve their listening skills and as a result they will become better managers, parents, coaches, spouses etc.

Should we accept it as true that learners receive more through listening than from any other perceptual mode? Certainly we all get enough practice at listening. Even those who are profoundly deaf are using their other senses to supply the mutual cues that come with active listening.  So if we are practising listening hundreds of times during each day of our lives, why should we believe formal training to be necessary?

Most major organisations must think that it is wrong to assume well-practised listeners have effective listening skills, otherwise why are they investing so much in courses and programmes to develop listening skills?

Somewhere employers must be losing sleep over negative consequences that are due to poor listening habits. What hard evidence is telling them that workers are not taking advantage of the spoken stimuli that could assist them in their jobs? Is that failure due to the listener simply not noticing those stimuli, or are they failing to process it correctly or is it that they cannot remember what they have heard?

So we are left with another of those truisms – that an individual can be taught to listen and that learners will do better in life and at work if they have been formally taught to listen.

I’m not sure whether they are getting a return on their investment – all those companies, institutions, public authorities and services that regularly run courses to improve learning skills. Do we think that learning an instinctive and deeply embedded skill like listening can be easy? Is it possible to unlearn habits that we have been reinforcing since the very earliest days of our childhood?

Let’s take a look at some of the techniques which typically are taught on listening skills courses:

  • Generate interest in the speaker’s topic. Look at the speaker. Study their body language – does it support what the speaker says? Show the speaker your interest by your own body language (reflective listening).
  • Use techniques like nodding, repeating, summarising, questioning and clarifying to demonstrate interest and involvement, but never fake attention or pretend to be listening (active listening).
  • Adapt to the speaker’s appearance and delivery.
  • Be aware of distractions and filter them out; don’t let your personal prejudices prevent you from receiving the message.
  • Listen for key concepts and major ideas instead of facts.
  • Listen to difficult expository material carefully. Then, interpret, evaluate and remember the most significant major points (or facts) by writing them down or memorising them.
  • Listen to the whole message before judging or disputing it. Don’t interrupt or ask questions unless the speaker invites them or loses track. Ask questions after the whole idea has been presented.

Should I accept it as true that you can learn skills by taking part in exercises? For example, can I build my own skills by listening to a recording that portrays particular behaviours and techniques, and referring to a checklist to focus on what I did or did not perceive or misconceive?

Is this focus on technique enough or do we need to do something more fundamental – a kind of rearrangement of the cognition of a subject so that they build entirely new concepts of listening, communication and interaction, and can see a clear link between alternative techniques for listening and conspicuous improvements in results?

Can we even get people interested and committed to learning to listen in the first place, or will that which we thought was essential training be no more than an away day to invigorate the worker outside of the daily routine or a background noise to replace the sound of traffic on the journey home?

As ever I leave you with the questions. I hope some kind souls will be moved to offer some answers. If you do have something to say, please use the form below.

Jan 11 2015

Do people really learn more by doing than by watching and/or listening?

Deep thoughts                   Recently I posted an item with the title “What’s been did and what’s been hid.” Here is the first of 12 truisms that have influenced how I have been doing my work as a learning and performance consultant over a number of years. I hope you will feel free to support it with a book reference, a personal experience, and example or a case study; otherwise knock it down using similar sources of evidence.

That people learn more by doing than by watching and/or listening is top of the list, because it is the belief that has most influenced the strategies and designs of tools and materials for learning that have occupied my time.

The idea is a very simple one – learners need to rehearse under a range of conditions that are typical of how they will use what they are learning.  Effective instruction must provide regular and frequent opportunities to try out and apply new behaviours. Little and often are the watchwords for practice, and there is incontestable proof that practice makes perfect.

It is best to turn the learner’s attention to a different practice or drill before they repeat identical practice or a similar task. Then their performance will be thoughtful and unlikely to become robotic or superstitious.

If you emphasise key points during practice, then learners are most likely to attend to these key points and remember them.

Specific forensic and observational feedback helps learners to identify any deficit in their performance, and so correct it. However we’ll put feedback itself under the microscope when we look at truism number 8, because not all feedback is necessarily constructive.

If a task is complex, it needs more practice to master it. You should break down a very complex task into separate steps or stages and practise them by themselves first and recombine them later.

When we come to consider truism number 6 we may acknowledge that memory aids and systems of coding help learners to recall information when they need it and so it may be counter-productive to memorise lists or facts when a better learning strategy is to group and code them so they become implicit.

Next on the list of 12 is the matter of situated learning, and I’ll ask you to support or challenge the belief that if you separate facts and concepts from the context in which they will use them, learners will simply forget them.

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