The Power of Listening
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
Winsights No. 33 (September 1999)
The following was originally written for fellow educators, but it now appears to bear as well immediately and strongly upon every area of our lives, far beyond the classroom. I’ll begin by talking first to the several teachers among the readers of this article, knowing, however, that most of its readership will be non-teachers.
Those of us who teach interactively:
How to power the whole process by teaching listening
Interactive learning focuses on what comes from the learner as a main means of learning or training or skills-building, rather than on what is imparted to the learner.
Education itself was named after the concept of “drawing forth” (“educare“) from the learner. The two times in history where this was, indeed, the main means of schooling—classical Greece and Renaissance Europe—in relation to population base the rate of production of world-class geniuses was more than ten million times greater than at present, where instruction is mainly didactic, despite all the modern tools of instruction and communications.
Schools stopped using interactive, Socratic, learning in the 19th Century and until recently had gone over almost exclusively to didactic methods. This is interesting from a standpoint of law, since virtually every public school and school system in the country was chartered to “provide the public an education,” and almost none of them are educating, only teaching!
Interactive learning was flirted with in the 1960s, but no one knew how to focus or control it, and its attempts nearly always ended in chaos. Nowadays, many systems exist for effectively controlling and focusing it: a teacher can, once he or she knows some of these methods, easily move into, direct and focus, and (equally important!) move out of interactive modes.
The world-wide creativity movement has been working with some of these methods for a long time, because nothing less will evoke creative performance from most training groups of businessmen and “ordinary” people.
From the huge diversity of creativity programs and methods which now exist, this writer some years back derived a simple set of ways to manage groups, named “Dynamic Format.” [The full step-by-step procedure is given on this Website.] But unbeknownst to this writer, something was still missing, something which bears very strongly upon every aspect of the lives of every one of us, not only in classrooms. That something is the basis of this article.
I experienced some extraordinary results this summer (1999) with one class of teachers, and with remarkably little effort. I was one of several professors in a program who taught by interactive methods and with some content of interactive method techniques (this is the excellent Masters-degree program taught in the National Institute for Teaching Excellence, Cambridge College in Cambridge, Mass.).
What made the whole thing take off in this one course was that I taught listening skills first. From that point on, everyone in that course was drawing out everyone else in that course (move over, Socrates!) as they had opportunity, and practically all I had to do was watch and enjoy the process. Every participant discovered thereby, within herself or himself, depths of awareness and context in what the course was “teaching” that she or he had never even suspected.
What I saw convinced me that this approach will work in every venue, in every course, wherever interactive learning is used as at least one of the vehicles for instruction. Anyone who transcends teaching with a little true facilitating or educating, at least at times…anyone who seeks literally to educate instead of merely to didactically impart information and a few skills or, Mensan-like, merely to score points in argument and by making statements … I believe will find this approach helpful.
To help the whole accelerated-learning movement and the whole creativity movement, I am not clutching this key to myself as my secret edge, a proprietary or trade secret, as would a few unnamed others in the creativity movement and in the commercial training field. We will all prosper as these movements prosper. I hereby publish the procedure openly right here.
Preceding Contexts
All my life I’ve experienced, and wondered at, the lack of listening skills in most teachers. Almost never do they seem to actually hear what their student is saying, in a question or in response to a teacher-asked question. Almost always it’s, “Very good, John,” or “Not quite, Johnny, what do you say, Peter?” as if the student’s statement either matches a pre-existing stencil or is rejected and search mode resumed until something comes along which superficially resembles the pre-existing stencil enough to go on with.
I’ve always felt that if learning had anything to do with what goes on in the learner, good listening would be the most critical key to good educating or even, more generally, to teaching. But seldom did I ever see it in action. I’ve tried to put it into practice myself, and think such listening as I manage to do is as much a key to what’s achieved in my courses as is any content or any body of methods, including my array of interactive methods. But it simply had not occurred to me before this summer to focus in on teaching good listening to teachers or to teach it as a way to enhance by many times the effectiveness of everything else.
In two previous courses this summer I had done a little reality checking and was quite struck by the fact that here was a Masters-level education program for teachers where, uniquely in this country if not in the world, over half of the courses were being taught by interactive methods, and I think that’s wonderful!
Nearly all the teachers in my classes, delighted by their own experience from throughout such a program, wanted to use such methods to teach with when they went back to their own classrooms. But:… almost none had a concrete feel for how to do it or any specific step in mind for how to get started doing it—despite the fact that interactive methods are so very much easier to teach with than didactic lecture instruction, and so very much more effective. This would mean that, as in previous years of this otherwise excellent program, relatively few would actually transfer the benefits of this program back to the kids in their own classrooms.
That was part of the reason why I was so delighted to have the specific steps of Dynamic Format to teach and practice. I came away from my first two courses of this summer convinced and satisfied that most or all of the teachers in those first two courses actually would transfer much of what they had learned at Cambridge College, from all their interactive courses, into their own classrooms. But I still felt something else was missing, something else still needed, to make all those teachers into being all that they can be.
In my final course of the summer, I appear to have found it. I found a back door through which to teach listening skills, taught it, and then got out of the way and let those newly developed listening skills and traits do the work of making every subsequent interactive process into an extraordinarily rich and meaningful learning experience.
Why a “back door”? I think if I had made that the front door, it would have put up walls. No one wants to be told or have it implied that he doesn’t listen all that well. “Now, class, we are going to learn and practice some listening skills today….” Ugh! This article may already have lost some readers for much the same reason, convinced that this certainly doesn’t apply to them! But for those of you who remain, goodly gentlepersons one and all, here are the specifics of the steps which gave me such happy results:
Procedure
- I had already set context with a few opening remarks, but as always needed to then open things up with an initial exercise modeling some of the partnered and buzz-grouped methods which I was to teach both as content and as vehicle for other content. The announced topic of the first paired-partner round—since this was an education class for teachers—was a question, the answer to which I had them write out first so the first buzz could take off well. That question? — What was the main reason(s) why he or she had gone into teaching in the first place.
- After the initial answers had been generated in written form, I had each pair quickly decide which of them was “A” and which of them was “B.” I then called all “B’s” up for an old-fashioned football huddle in the front corner of the room. (As you can imagine, this was in itself arousing and a signal that something was different from the routine in this class.) My simple instruction to the “Bs” — “To every answer of your partner, no matter what your partner says, say, ‘Why is that important to you?’” Then I sent them back to their respective partners and began the buzz on the question for “A” to answer, “What were your main reason(s) for becoming a teacher?”
That “Why is that important to you?” procedure, which usually gets to some pretty deep levels of introspection pretty quickly, is not original here. I had acquired it maybe three years ago during one of the annual Creative Problem-Solving Institutes in Buffalo, NY. If anyone reading this knows the source, I’d be much obliged to learn it since I like to attribute credit where it’s due. But using it in such a sequence, or for purpose of being a back door into which to sneak listening skills, I believe is probably original. (Editorial note: the source turned out to be Virginia Satir, as conveyed through NLP.)
Its further significance is apparent when one considers what makes a Socratic learning session meaningful: Where does the learner have to look in his awarenesses to find answer — into short-term shallow memory as in most classroom questioning, into long-term memory, into actual and sensory-based perception, and/or into deeper thought and reasoning? What is it we truly want to reinforce in ourselves, in one another, and in our students?
- After letting that run for maybe 4 to 5 minutes, before the pat question became too apparent, I then used the signal system (3 ‘bings” on chime or waterglass as the usual pre-agreed instant talking-pause) to insert the following instruction into the ongoing proceeding: “Now for all “B’s” — let’s open it now and use every way you can to draw out your partner “A” further on his or her answers, not just with that one question. Draw out your partner further in every way you can, without getting in “A’s” way or interrupting his or her flow…”
- After a few more minutes I then had them flip roles, “A” getting some of his or her own back by drawing out partner “B” in turn on the same initial issue. After allowing an equivalent time:
- I asked in plenary (didactic lecture) style how it felt to actually have someone listen to you on something that was important to you. As the very positive responses were reported, these teachers were educators enough to begin grasping already that there might be some significance to this for their profession as “educators.” For other teachers, you might have to “draw arrows.”
- I then threw them back into “buzz,” first as partners and then pulled into groups of four members each (could have been five or six and still worked), on the question, “What are some of the ways you notice, or which make you feel, that you are actually being listened to?” And then a few buzzing minutes later I asked them to “turn that into prescriptive techniques for how to make someone else feel he or she is being listened to?”
The first few times after that, when we went into other issues a la interactive “buzz,” I simply reminded these teachers beforehand to practice their own prescriptive techniques, and those buzzes really flew! Everyone was well drawn out in what he or she could perceive in relation to the question or buzz topic. Everyone had much and in depth, once the flow was started, to be drawn out on.
Further Comment
Ironically, it was a full year ago and many courses and workshops ago that I had done one other good thing in this context. It simply hadn’t occurred to me to apply it as a lead-in for my own courses and workshops generally.
In a learning enrichment project in Ohio, I had taught parents in that project some skills at listening to one another. (Even some adults have never truly had the experience of being really listened to, and this seems to be a pretty transformative experience.) Then I had them practice listening to one another’s kids — and for nearly every kid this was transformative because of never having had an adult really listen to him or her before.
I will have to check back to learn whether, as I hoped, any of that ever did transfer back into any of the parents’ actually listening to what their own kids have to say. I’d like to revisit some form of this approach in other learning-enrichment projects, maybe through PTAs, and see if in fact this will make the kinds of profound home improvement which I think it can.
How productive and efficient could workplaces become if the common practice was to draw out one another’s perceptions and awarenesses so that decisions and actions taken were at the top of people’s capacities instead of at the lowest common denominator this side of getting fired?
The whole point of interactive learning, as Socrates discovered 2,000 years ago, is that most of the understandings we’re struggling to learn or teach are there already, a priori, buried in prior exposures, experience and the unconscious. It is so much easier and more meaningful if, by one means or another, we force ourselves and/or one another to look within our own awarenesses and to respond or seek to respond from those awarenesses.
That response reinforces, per psychology’s main Law of Effect, both those awarenesses and the trait or behavior of being aware. Whatever externally sourced information is still needing to be put in, integrates quickly, easily and meaningfully around that already-known core, once that is activated. With properly focused techniques, interactive learning is a remarkably effective way to teach, even for klutzes. But now I realize that a teacher who doesn’t listen short-circuits part of the effectiveness. By not hearing the actual response of the student, a teacher cuts off and even reverses some of that reinforcement.
I’m publishing this here, in an article which has many non-teachers as well as teachers, because it is now overwhelmingly clear to me that one of the very best things we can do for one another, in or out of the classroom context, is to listen to one another, with full attention, respect and regard. Really listen.