Grade 6 · SEL · Lesson 25

Active listening and paraphrasing

Active listening is the difference between hearing and understanding. Hearing is what your ears do automatically. Active listening is a choice — you give the other person your eyes, your ears, your mind and your voice, and you check that you actually got their meaning before you reply. The check is called paraphrasing. You say back, in your own words, what you think they meant. If you got it right, the speaker feels truly heard. If you got it wrong, they correct you, and the conversation gets clearer instead of messier.

What this lesson teaches

1Describe what active listening is and how it differs from waiting to speak
2Apply the four attention cues — eyes, ears, mind, voice — when someone is talking
3Paraphrase a speaker using sentence frames such as "So what I hear is..." and "It sounds like..."
4Match speaker statements to the paraphrase that best mirrors the meaning

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