Lecture Listening

One of the best ways to practice reflective listening is to go to your lectures and be able to fully understand what was being said and taught throughout the day. I want to dedicate this post to my Human Resource management class, because today the whole lecture was dedicated to debriefing the Big Money Consulting case. This case’s main issue was the lack of women in senior management positions at Big Money Consulting. During the debriefing process, each student had to contribute to the discussion by sharing his/her opinion regarding certain topics. I figured that this would be an excellent way to practice my reflective listening skills.

What I did

I decided to sit back and critically think about what each student said during their contribution to the discussion. What I mean by this is, when the professor asked our opinion on a certain topic I would raise my hand to contribute to the discussion with my point of view. Now since there are forty students in the class, I was obviously not called upon every time. When I wasn’t called on, I decided to lower my hand and listen exclusively to what the speaking student was saying. I would absorb the information that they gave to the class, think critically about how their answer related to mine, and piggyback off of their response.

The results

During this process I realized that everyone has a different opinion on the case study itself, but I was able to correlate my response based off of what my classmates said. This lead to many new ideas, as well as a new perception on certain topics. Reflective listening is all about being able to sum up what was told to you. The information you were given may not be that important, but if you think critically about what was told to you and about the perceptions of other students, you can use this to your advantage and establish new grounds and new ideas. In the end, just sit back and relax and let students do the talking for you.