How to Help Students Learn to Listen to Each Other’s Stories

By Jessica Fagen 

Most people can vividly remember a moment in their life when they felt very deeply heard and understood by another — perhaps by a friend or partner, therapist or teacher, family or community member. On the other hand, most can also remember, equally vividly, a time when they felt profoundly misunderstood or unheard. Those moments leave a lasting impact on us, and can often strengthen — or break — relationships. The inability to listen can have broader societal implications: It can split groups of people who have different values and experiences, potentially turning neighbors into antagonists. It seems that too few of us are equipped with the active listening skills necessary to make others feel truly heard.

Educators around the US are grappling with this problem — and they’re coming up with solutions. For example, Lisa Thyer and Chris Wendelin, English teachers at Amos Alonzo Stagg High School in Palos Hills, Illinois, are intentionally centering active listening skills in their classroom. In 2014, they created a yearlong project-based elective that focused on connection, empathy, and storytelling that could serve as a model for others.

In the class, students interviewed one another, their teachers, and other school community members, eventually compiling and publishing their stories in a book called 111th and Roberts: Where Our Stories Intersect. Chris and Lisa’s course was so successful that they offered it again the following year, and have been teaching the course every year since. One of the key lessons from that course is a simple one that might feel counterintuitive to some: The first step in learning to tell your own story is to learn to hear someone else’s.

Why is active listening important?
According to research, active listening is a key component in relationship building, conflict resolution, and empathy development. Contrary to the popular wisdom that empathy is built by imagining or supposing what life would be like in another person’s shoes, research suggests that interpersonal understanding comes from an ability to listen to others discussing what life is like in their shoes: Social psychologists Tal Eyal and Mary Steffel call this “getting perspective, not simply taking perspective.”

Active listening helps people feel more heard or understood, especially when compared to other types of listening responses such as simple acknowledgement or giving advice. This is especially important when listening to understand others with different identity markers and life experiences.

Listening to others’ stories is an excellent way to challenge dominant narratives or “single stories.” By engaging in deep listening, we can form a more complex, nuanced, and accurate perspective of any issue. One study looking at conflict resolution found that intergroup hostility was reduced if “members of the disempowered group spoke to an individual from the dominant group, and (critically) felt ‘heard.’”

Active listening in the classroom
I work with Voice of Witness (VOW), an oral history nonprofit that advances human rights by amplifying the voices of people impacted by — and fighting against — injustice.

VOW’s education program trains teachers and students to create space for deep listening and learning by harnessing the power of storytelling. Our storytelling projects help students become more active, empathic listeners as they conduct oral history interviews with peers, family, and community members. VOW’s online resource library offers free lesson plans that feature activities for building active listening, social-emotional learning, and critical thinking skills. How could you launch a storytelling project in your own classroom? Start with these three steps, aimed at first developing your students’ ability to listen carefully to the story they are being told.

Introduce “safe and brave” storytelling
Start with a framing activity that sets the tone for a larger storytelling project and helps students generate their own ideas about what active listening might look like and what impact it may have on someone sharing their story. Ask students to imagine themselves in the storyteller role by presenting this prompt:

Imagine a deep, personal, or important story you have about yourself: a story about someone or something that has shaped who you are today. What would you need in order to feel safe and brave enough to tell your story?

Encourage students to answer this question as broadly as possible, considering the who, where, why, and how: Who would students feel comfortable telling their story to? Where would they tell their story, and what would the location need to feel, sound, look like? Why would students tell this story — what would they hope the listener would learn or do as a result? How would students want to feel while they were telling their story? What about afterward? How would students know their story was being truly heard and understood?

Allow each student to share a response to the prompt with the class, recording their answers on the board or a large sheet of paper. After collecting all student responses, spend time unpacking key terms in their responses.

For example, students may say they would want to tell their story to “someone who isn’t going to judge me” or “someone who is respectful.” You might pose questions such as: How do you know when someone is judging you? What does it look like or sound like when someone is listening to you respectfully?

To delve deeper into the importance of sharing and receiving personal stories, you may also choose to present the following principles for ethical storytelling for students to discuss. For each of these statements, ask: What do you think this principle means? How does this relate to sharing personal stories? How might this statement change how you would listen to another person’s story?

Practice paraphrasing and using nonverbal cues
Two fundamental active listening techniques to practice with your students are demonstrating nonverbal involvement and paraphrasing the speaker’s words in a way that accurately reflects their meaning.

As a quick warm-up activity, ask students to show you, without saying any words, that they are listening to you as you read or tell them a brief story. Halfway through the story, ask them to switch and now show you that they are not listening, noting that exaggerated or theatrical demonstrations are OK for this activity. Afterward, record students’ observations about body language — what nonverbal cues communicate interest and engagement, and which nonverbal cues communicate uninterest or lack of engagement?

Model paraphrasing with your students by asking a volunteer to tell a simple story. Use sentence starters like “What I’m hearing is…” and “It sounds like you’re saying…” to paraphrase what the student says. Remind students that the key to paraphrasing is to capture the speaker’s meaning in a way that “demonstrates unconditional acceptance and unbiased reflection.” 

When you model paraphrasing, try to be as objective as possible, avoiding adding your own interpretation or judgment with phrases like “I think you mean…” or “It was sad/funny/inspiring when you said…” However, if the speaker expresses sadness themselves, for example, it can be an effective paraphrasing technique to say, “I can understand why it was so sad when…”

After presenting these active listening skills, give students the opportunity to practice in partner pairs with storytelling prompts like the ones on this deep conversation starter sheet. Students may choose a question to ask their partner, then practice demonstrating nonverbal engagement and paraphrasing their partner’s response. Make sure to switch roles so every student has the chance to be both speaker and listener.

Demonstrate active listening through questions
A third, perhaps counterintuitive, component to effective active listening is the ability to ask questions. Studies have found that people find listeners who ask questions to be attentive and responsive, helping the speaker to feel heard. It is important to note here that the goal of active listening questions is to “encourage speakers to elaborate on [their] experiences.” These questions should stay on the same topic, but ask for more detail or depth. Common question starters might include: “Can you give me an example of…?” “How did you feel about…?” “What else do you remember about…?”

You can encourage students to think about different types of questions and the types of responses they elicit with a question game. Set up the game by saying to your students: “We’re going to play a game today in which you’re going to ask me questions. The catch is that I have a secret rule that the questions need to follow — I’m looking for certain types of questions. If you ask me the type of question that follows the secret rule, you get a point. If the question doesn’t follow the rule, I get a point. I’m not going to tell you any more about what I’m looking for in the questions. You will need to guess what the secret rule is.”

You can do a warm-up round to introduce the game to your students. In the warm-up round, perhaps the rule is: “Question needs to have a yes-or-no answer” or “Question needs to be open-ended.” In the second round, the rule should be: “Question needs to stay on the same topic.” Questions that prompt for more elaboration should thus earn students a point.

As students continue their storytelling project, encourage them to continue asking these follow-up questions to demonstrate their interest and attention to the speaker.
Explicitly teaching and practicing active listening techniques will give students skills with the potential to impact their relationships, careers, and overall well-being. As strong active listeners, students can have deeper, more meaningful conversations with the people closest to them, can actively build and strengthen community, and can communicate effectively from a place of understanding.