Activities Spelled Out: Active Listening
Throughout peer mediation training, students are not only learning skills to teach them the mediation process, but they are also learning everyday useful communication and listening tools. At the beginning of our training, we introduce a handful of active listening skills: non-verbal communication, open-ended and closed-ended questions, mirroring (reframing), and neutral language. Practicing these skills early in life are instrumental to becoming a strong communicator and peer mediator!
In our active listening activity, we’ve seen students break out of their shells with this role-play opportunity, and we hope it’ll also bring joyful learning to you as well!
Objective:
Students understand core characteristics of the active listening skills;
Students apply their understanding of the active listening skills using the provided scenarios.
Supplies Needed:
Active listening scenarios (feel free to use our scenarios or make up ones!)
Active listening reference sheet
Active listening station signs
1 Non-Verbal Communication sign
1 Open-Ended & Closed-Ended Questions sign
1 Mirroring (Reframing) sign
1 Neutral Language sign
Activity Directions:
Ask students to find a partner. If there is an odd number of students, ask students without a partner to join a pair. Assign the pairs/trios a number from 1-4. This number will indicate what active listening station they will start at (example. Non-Verbal Communication = 1, Open-Ended & Closed-Ended Questions = 2, etc…).
After each group is assigned a number/skill to start with. Explain that each student will get a chance to practice each active listening skill with their partner. Students will read the scenario posted at each station and decide which character they’d like to act out first. After about 2 and a half minutes, they will switch roles. Encourage students to use skills they learned from previous stations to build their knowledge. By the time students arrive at the final station, they should attempt to use all four skills as they roleplay the final scenario. Students will be at stations for five minutes until they’re asked to rotate to the next station. Students may use their active listening reference sheet while completing the activity.
Once students are clear on instructions, direct students to their starting stations. If there is enough staff capacity, assign a staff member to each station to help facilitate. There might be multiple groups at each station– make sure there are enough copies of the scenarios for each group to access.
After each pair/trio completes each station, students may return to their seats. This is a good time for students and staff to debrief their experience with the active listening activity.
Roles in Peer Mediation
Launching a peer mediation program at any organization is difficult work, and often it takes a village. Clearly defining the roles of those that are responsible for program implementation is crucial to clarity and success. We want to break down definitions of titles in our peer mediation program that others might find useful when implementing similar programming to build consensus of role responsibilities.
Peer Mediator: We work with both middle and high school students, and we ask that they come in curious about peer mediation and willing to participate in whatever capacity they have. While engaging in the materials, we also encourage our students to provide reflective feedback on ways that we can improve our student training process.
Facilitator: Facilitators are CRCSTL staff members. Primarily, the facilitators’ goal is to create relatable, digestible content for students and to deliver the material in a meaningful way. As a third-party provider, we are continuing to navigate what it looks like to facilitate and build trust in a temporary space. In addition to this, we can help schools and organizations dream up new ways to build a culture of effective and student centered conflict engagement.
Sponsor: Sponsors are staff members of the school or organization we are working for and with. Sponsors are often less involved in training the students in mediation skills, but are normally heavily involved and committed to the peer mediation process, as they will lead peer mediation programming after CRCSTL’s training is complete and figure out the best way to mold the program to the context of the school/agency, of which they are the experts! We are incredibly grateful for both the trust and support our faculty sponsors provide our agency as well as the students. They are invaluable to the future success of their organization’s peer mediation program.
Note: These role descriptions are reflective of CRCSTL’s peer mediation model and may look different from program to program.
Are they ready to mediate? Assessing student progress in a pilot program
At the end of training with our seventh and eighth graders, we came up with a system to help assess students’ progress on peer mediation skills. Our peer mediation team met and discussed how to evaluate students and their acquired skills, without making the students feel like they were taking an academic test.
Our goal for the created assessment was to have an direct, honest conversation with each student about feelings after the completed training; as well as, noting skills they were confident in or needed more support on.
After meeting up with students on a one-on-one basis, we now have concrete understanding of ways to support students for the fall semester and are able to provide the school’s staff sponsor with information on our students’ learning. On another practical level, the progress report tool gave us data about concepts we rushed through and/or explained well. As a pilot program, this is invaluable knowledge to us for our future work in peer mediation spaces.
We are providing the progress report tool in this blog post as a reference and guide as some of you may be implementing your own peer mediation programming. We hope this will be as useful of a tool for you as it was for us!
You can view the peer mediator progress report template by clicking here or visiting the educator portal section of this website.
Intermission
As we wrap up programming with our first school, I want to hit the pause button and let things soak in. We have now been implementing student led peer mediation training for the last three months and it is one of the highlights of the work we do at Conflict Resolution Center – St. Louis.
This blog serves as a record book of notable moments in this piloting process, and we believe having this documentation will be a primary source to help answer the question, “How can we improve our next time around?” It has also given us reason to give thanks.
In this moment of reflection, we want to thank those of you following our journey. We love sharing the joyous and challenging moments with you, and hope that you have been able to take away something from our experiences as well.
I am also experiencing feelings of gratitude to this process, to our kids who welcome us each week, to our staff, and for those who have done peer mediation work before us.
Soon, we will hit the unpause button and go back to programming and lesson planning and facilitating and a few hundred other things with our partnerships (we have plans to run a peer mediation program at our local library in the summer. Yay!) but now, we rest.
Reflections on Student Engagement and Morale
We’ve gotten to the stage with our weekly peer mediation training sessions where students are familiar with our consistent presence in their school. We get buzzed into the school main doors, the staff at the welcome desk warmly greets us, points to the sign-in book, and soon, we make our way to our designated spot. With comfort and routine, however, often brings new challenges.
Many of our students show excitement of us being there, engaging in the material, asking thoughtful questions to create lively conversation. There are some students who come in, distracted from the last hour, some come in exhausted with only a few hours of sleep the previous night, and others who choose not to come.
It is important to note that although every student is not always engaged, we are asking a lot of them– we’re asking them to rethink how conflict is handled in their school system, a concept that often doesn’t get challenged. It can often feel like a heavy task.
But sometimes the introspection comes later and we feel moments of defeat. And to be fully honest, sometimes this is hard. It can be difficult seeing students choose that this program is not the best fit for them, or to be in a session with low engagement. I often wonder: How do we know that they’re taking anything away from any of this?
After experiencing one of those sessions (one of the harder ones), our sponsor came to us and told us that she has something to share. She went on to explain that a teacher complimented one of the students in our program. The teacher noticed the student's ability to process conflict in a healthier manner than prior to the program. The sponsor added that it is often difficult to see the effects of a program like this and so she was sure to convey the message. That was pretty cool to hear.
At the end of each session, we revisit the staff at the front desk and sign out. They smile, sometimes ask how the students are doing with the material, and always enthusiastically state, “See you next week!" While these weekly sessions can often feel challenging, and like a small drop in the bucket of the student experience, we are reenergized by the fact that these small sessions can create ripple effects, even when we don’t see the results. Students are slowly starting to engage with conflict in different and meaningful ways, and that is something that cannot always be measured and defined.
