Pastoral Assistants' Course
Session 3 - THE ART OF LISTENING
- Aim
- To identify some basic listening skills
- To consider factors which hinder good listening
Prayer and Reading
Psalm 29 or "Just Listen!"
- Introduction to Listening
- Listening is an important way of valuing and understanding others.
- Sharing with one another will be an important part of this session – but without pressure - we must all decide how far to go.
- Everything is said in confidence.
- Allow time for feedback from last time
- Opening exercise 1
- Divide into pairs.
- One person tells the other about something that has happened in the last week.
- The listener does their best to ignore them and communicated non-verbally a complete lack of interest.
- The pairs change roles.
- In the whole group discuss how it felt not to be listened to, how hard it was to keep speaking and how easy/hard it was to ignore someone.
- Listening Exercise 2
- In pairs one person tells the other about a happy day.
- The listener is not allowed to interrupt but shows they are giving their full attention by facial expression and body language.
- The pairs change roles.
- In the whole group discuss how it felt to be listened to with attention and how it felt for the listeners not to speak
- Listening Exercise 3
- Divide into groups of three.
- Each member of the group takes turns to be speaker, listener and time keeper.
- The speaker has 3 mins to talk about “An important event in my life” while the listener encourages with non verbal prompts.
- At the end of 3 mins the listener feeds back the main points of the speaker with the observer noting how accurate this is.
- Change roles till each has had a turn.
- In the whole group discuss how the exercise went
- Exercise 4
- In the whole group each member comes to the leader in turn and is given an emotion to act out for the others to guess. The group may only ask yes/no questions. Each member takes turn.
- In the whole group discuss the four exercises & look again at Session 2 – Handout 3. What things help communication and listening? What hinders it?
