TES quality: Listening Skills 

Parallel lecture (P12)

We value everyone's right to be heard and to receive emotional support, and we believe that listening is a key skill for providing emotional well-being in all situations. Yet people don't listen to understand, they listen to respond. This is because we are used to talking about what concerns or interests us. The deep urge to send and the simultaneous incompetence to receive also seems to be a spirit of time. Yet listening is the soul of conversation: it's about mastering emotions, juggling values, reflecting needs, respecting maps of reality, conveying information and asking useful questions. MonaLisa (Measurement of nowadays advanced listening skills) was a EU project that in 2019-2022 explored what competencies are useful to be learned to acquire listening skills. The result is eight competencies for good listening, a web-based listening test and a practice platform for improving listening skills. You will learn about the research on listening competencies, the results and the learning platform in this presentation.

LISTENING SKILLS, THE ART OF ASKING QUESTIONS
Francesca SACCO

To write her book “The Magic of Listening”, Italian-Swiss journalist Francesca Sacco took a short training in a benevolent questioning technique. More specifically, the Solution-Focused Approach (SFA). The SFA was developed starting in the 1980s in the United States at Family therapy centre. The psychologists had noticed that some patients who were unwell were still complaining about being unwell years later. These psychologists then developed a questioning technique to help people get moving again. These are particular and very specific questions. They encourage people to think. The idea is to explore the person's inner resources, based on the principle that everyone has inner resources.