As a child, listening was one of my strongest assets. I am a strong auditory learner. If I sat in class and listened to the teacher, I would remember what was taught. Taking notes often distracted me and made me miss things. When taking assessments, I could hear my teacher in my head: The exact words they said, the cadence of the speech. When talking with friends and family, listening helped me understand them. Often hearing the unsaid with in the conversation. If I had taken the Effective Listening Survey when I was in high school, I believe I would have scored as a skillful listener in nearly all the sections. Taking the survey now, shows a different story.
Two of the sections, I did fairly well: Section A (9) and Section D (8). The other sections, I scored quite a bit higher than the target zone: section B (16), Section C (13), and Section E (16). This has revealed some interesting developments in my habits, personality, and abilities. One reflection is that due to becoming an adult with ambitions and responsibilities, I've become more concerned about all the different tasks I need to do. I am also not as patient with others. It feels like there is only so much time to get things done, so I need to maximize efforts which results in less listening and more time focused on my own things. I've also come out of my introverted shell more since high school. I was good at listening, not at sharing. Now I've learned to share my own thoughts and experiences to make better connections with people. This is definitely a good thing, but I worry that it came at the cost of not acutely listening to others any more. It is something I noticed before taking the survey. I need to focus more on the other person and less on the connection to myself. In these moments, I wonder how I lost that asset of my youth. It was like I took for granted that I would always be good at listening and didn't actively keep it as tool in my tool box.
The survey was good at pointing out what my triggers are for non-productive listening. The two big ones were multitasking distractions and focusing on my own experience while listening. Knowing this can help me be more attune to the situation when talking with my mentee. Having a scheduled time to meet with them will help with compartmentalizing my responsibilities. This is the time to focus on the mentee, not other things. Taking notes with actual words said by my mentee will help me reflect more on their experience and perspective. With active listening, I can help identify the real needs of my mentee and help them reflect on them too. I can use active listening to gather data to support them.
To help myself be a better listener, I have a plan to use a couple of tools to keep me on track. As stated above, I'm going to schedule time for myself to attend to my mentee. My Google calendar is what keeps me sane during the school year, so plugging specific mentor items into the calendar will help me focus my time on supporting my mentee. In addition to this, I really like using a journal to help focus my attention to my mentee and what they are experiencing. The ones in Mentoring Matters are great and I can see them being useful to start. I think it would be best to have my mentee pick out what ones work best for them, whether it is the more guided questions like the reflection journal (Form Js), the 3-2-1 forms, or the double entry journal. I also like the idea of offering different ways to reflect like cartooning, voice memos, etc. I think the method should work for my mentee and I can adapt to help support regardless of medium. I also plan on creating a simple mantra to have in front of me when working with my mentee. This will be the cue to myself to work on active listening. I'm thinking it might just be an image, that will remind me of what my skill level once was and how I want to return to it, especially when supporting my mentee.
You have made some interesting connections about listening skills in our own learning journey. As an auditory learner, you developed a highly functioning process for acquiring and recalling information. Do you find that you have increased appreciation for those young folks in your library who exhibit those same behaviors? Even though in adulthood, you have expanded your communication abilities in other ways, you still have those listening proclivities at your fingertips. Knowledge of UDL is something that we all have to keep in mind as we guide our mentees, too.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like you have some ideas for fine tuning some of the surprises that were revealed in the listening survey. Now you have a roadmap that will help you as a mentor/coach in the future. I also see that many of these ideas will help you as a teacher, too. You seem to be finding some forms and other ideas from MM that will help you develop your own toolkit for mentoring. I like the idea that you might work to have a simple document/process/reminder to keep handy as you have learning structured conversations with your mentee. If you take a look at Beth Shelley's blog, she has created a very simple doc that she intends to use for the same purpose. I really like the 3-2-1 form for a quick way to summarize an issue at hand for the mentee. Looks like you are off to a fast start!
Judy