19 Active Listening Exercise: Self-Evaluation through Discussion Posts (IUPUI)

The following assignment was created by Audrey Ricke, Professor of Anthropology at IUPUI.

Description:

This discussion post is designed to promote undergraduate students’ self-evaluation of their active-listening and note-taking skills and provide peer advice and tools to support mastery and growth. It asks students to practice active-listening while doing some form of note recording, e.g. jottings, drawings, mental notes, or typed notes, during a live or recorded presentation. Students type and post more formal notes with one question based on the presentation material, do a self-evaluation of their formal notes, reflecting on the challenges of doing active-listening, and provide advice for another student. The exercise can be used with live or prerecorded presentations and thus is applicable to in-person, online synchronous, and online asynchronous learning.

Some of the benefits of using this activity as a discussion post is that it targets a skill that is needed to be successful in university courses and qualitative research, as well as in business and personal relationships. It helps students assess their own active-listening and note-taking skills and encourages peer support and problem-solving while also ratifying that every student has something important to share to help others. The discussion post activity has the potential to foster discussion about technical and social issues surrounding active-listening and its challenges as well as on how to effectively conduct certain types of qualitative research, such as interviews and participant observation.

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