Any good suggestions on hands-on learning activities to illustrate active listening. Thanks,
Tara

This message has been edited. Last edited by: taraedu,

Try this one...

Little Grey Rabbit

Ask participants to think of an animal and give it two descriptions, for example, a sexy, spiky hedgehog. What you need to do is go to another member in the group and pass on your animal to them and then collect their animal, you then keep doing this until you’ve passed animals to everyone in the group.

You are only allowed to say the animal and it’s description once, if you can’t remember what was said then when you go to pass the animal to the next person you must say ‘can’t remember’. Or if you remember parts of it say, blank, hopping, blank.

Once the participants have completed the exercise ask each participant to give you the name of the animal they currently have and write it on the flipchart. Then go round and find out the animals that everyone initially had.

This is a simple exercise, but only (xx) animals survived. So, what went wrong?

This exercise demonstrates that because we are only interested in getting our own message across and do not show any active listening, we have no or little recollection of what the person said.

There are other training activities on my website too.

Try: Listening the Forgotten Skill by Olsen. Great number of assessment tools.

Nero