Assignment 7

What is the significance of active listening, non-judgement and empathy for a teacher’s role in
institutes of higher education? Reflect on the importance of these skills using examples from
your interactions with students.
Active listening means listening to someone knowing the goal is to understand, respond to, and
remember what they’re saying. In active listening, the listener sets aside any judgments to truly
focus on what the other person has to say. Active listening is a powerful way to show someone
that their perspective and lived experiences matter. It also develops empathy; hearing another
person without judgment helps the listener move beyond differences, and see other people
more fully.
In practice, active listening examples include:

 Letting the person speak without interrupting

 Asking questions and summarizing what the person is saying, making sure you
understand
 Giving nonverbal cues, like nodding and making eye-contact
In the classroom, active listening creates an environment of collaboration where everyone’s
perspective and experience matter. This holds true for both teachers and students.
The belief that all students should have the opportunity to develop their identities and
perspectives as learners, knowing that their voices have value. By actively listening to students,
teachers show students that their thoughts and experiences matter. They also promote equity
in the classroom. Equity in education means that every student gets what they need in a
manner that best suits them. Too often, inequitable practices happen when adults in power
assume they know what students need without giving students the chance to advocate for
themselves.
For students, active listening promotes meaningful, engaged learning, as they develop curiosity
and become more intentional about understanding assignments and lessons. This also
promotes collaboration in the classroom by teaching students how to listen to one another
without bias, and build on each other’s perspectives. So much of what high school should instill
in students—building relationships, identifying community needs, helping make the world a
better place—comes down to empathy. The Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley defines
empathy as “the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine
what someone else might be thinking or feeling.”
For teachers wondering how to teach this abstract skill to students, active listening is a
powerful, tangible place to start. Active listening begins from a place of attention—paying
attention to the other person’s words and body language in order to understand what they’re
saying and to feel their emotions. Ultimately, this listening enables students to empathize
deeply with their peers and community members, which can then lead to action as students
consider how to apply what they learn in school to solve problems and improve their
communities.
Empathic listening begins by paying careful attention to our children’s words, tone of voice, and
body language, and then reflecting back to them the particular emotions2 we hear or sense. I
sense you’re feeling discouraged. I hear how angry you are. You seem upset. There’s a look of
sadness on your face. In this way, we invite our children’s feelings into the room, noticing and
labeling those feelings. This is the opposite of what we usually do. Our kids typically experience
us trying to push their painful emotions away. They rarely hear us say, “Let’s pay attention to the
hurt,” or “Tell me more about the sadness.” Instead, we focus on the story — “Tell me what
happened” — rather than the child’s emotional experience. Yet it’s the emotional experience
that needs our focus if we want our sons and daughters to come away from conversations with
a sense of being deeply seen and heard. Empathic listening must be non-judgmental: we convey
that feelings are acceptable just as they are, without labeling them good, bad, right or wrong.
This teaches our children to accept their emotions without filtering them through a judging
lens. It’s easy to conclude that “something must be wrong with me” if we think of our emotions
as somehow wrong or bad.
Following our empathic listening, if the source of our kids’ emotions isn’t already clear and our
kids are calm enough to engage their logical brain (see Two Brains), we become a curious
Sherlock, wondering what triggered those emotions. “Where do you think the sadness is
coming from?” We’re teaching our kids to reflect on their feelings in order to make sense of
them. “Where do you think the hurt is coming from?”
Finally, we normalize the emotions: “Of course you feel that way,” or “I’m sure many kids would
feel the way you do.” Normalization lets youth know that they aren’t weird or unusual to feel as
they do. Empathic listening without judgment and with normalization is the formula that leads
our children to trust their emotions, with the invaluable self-esteem boost that comes with that.
“Knowing that my feelings are okay allows me to know that I am okay.”