Active Listening

Resources you will need:

Prepared lists of words
A handful of Pens
Plenty of paper

Aim

To enable young people to understand the importance and value of listening.

Overview

This exercise is a fun and interactive way to get the group to listen to what each other is saying and understand that in order to listen we have to use more than just our ears.

Instructions

listening.jpg

  1. Tell the group that they are going to play a memory game and split them into smaller groups.

  2. For this activity, the facilitator lists a set of words that the young people have to remember and write out afterwards.

  3. Make sure the words on the list are related to each other in some way (e.g. types of food, clothing, animals etc), but also include a couple of completely unconnected, random words.

  4. Ask the young people to focus on their feet whilst you read out the list.

  5. Once you have read out the list ask them in their groups to write down as many words as they remember.

  6. Ask the groups to feedback.

  7. Highlight the words that were missed and also if these were the random words or not (you will notice that people find is easy to remember the words that are related, but not the ones that are random. People will also imagine words on the list that didn’t appear (e.g., assuming that they heard the word, ‘cat’ just because it fits in the category).

  8. Highlight to the group that although people think they are good at listening, often they won’t remember information, or they will imagine something was said when it wasn’t.

  9. Relate this to conversations with friends, and talk about the possible consequences of this.

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