How to listen — really listen — to someone you don’t agree with

by Tania Israel, Ideas TED.com: https://ideas.ted.com/how-to-listen-really-listen-to-someone-you-dont-agree-with/

    Image: Avalon Nuovo

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Listening may not be the most exciting part of conversation, but it’s essential if you want to have a meaningful exchange with another person.

Think about a time you felt misunderstood by somebody. Did you defend yourself? Correct them? Or simply disengage? Regardless of your response, you likely didn’t feel comfortable with them.

Now think of how it feels to be understood — you can relax, you want to open up, you feel more trusting. When you listen in a way that makes the other person feel heard, they are more likely to share information with you. And when you are actively listening, you are also more likely to take it in.

In my training as a psychologist, I spent a lot of time learning how to actively listen. I can tell you from years of experience that having a productive dialogue is not possible without active listening.

The 1st active listening skill is nonverbal attending

Nonverbal attending means giving someone your full attention without speaking. Here are some of the basics:

Keep your body open to the other person. Try to be relaxed but attentive. If you’re sitting, lean forward a bit rather than slouching back.

Maintain moderate levels of eye contact. Look at the speaker but not like you’re in a staring contest with them.

Use simple gestures to communicate to the other person that you’re listening and encouraging them to continue. Head nods are one way — just don’t do it continuously. Occasionally say “Mm-hmm” to communicate encouragement.

The final key to nonverbal attending is staying silent. But remember: You can’t listen very well if you’re talking. In fact, if you rearrange the letters of the word “listen,” it spells “silent.” I can’t believe it took me 20 years of teaching to discover this, but it’s a useful reminder!

Offering somebody uninterrupted time to talk, even a few minutes, is a generous gift that we seldom give each other. It doesn’t mean you have to keep your mouth shut for hours and hours, but I encourage you to see how long you can simply listen to somebody without wanting to interrupt.

Some people find the most difficult part of listening is not talking. There’s a deep humility in listening, because your focus is on understanding the other person rather than on saying everything that comes into your mind. Your aim is to understand and help the speaker feel understood, and reserve your speech for what moves you closer to either of these goals.

The 2nd active listening skill is reflecting

Reflecting means repeating or rephrasing key content or meaning from the other person.

A reflection communicates that you heard what the other person said. Rather than saying, “I hear you,” you show you’ve heard them by sharing back what they said. It also confirms that you have an accurate understanding of their thoughts.

If you’re a little off target, it gives them an opportunity to correct you. This can be useful if you didn’t quite understand what they were saying.

For example, let’s say a friend tells you, “I just came from a PTA meeting, and I’m so frustrated with charter schools! They’re draining money from the school system which is already stretched, so we don’t have the funds to support students and teachers. Plus, they’re weakening the teachers’ union. I wish the charter school parents would put all that energy into supporting existing schools instead of creating new ones.”

If you said, “You think charter schools are ruining the educational system,” your friend could clarify, “Well, not exactly ruining it as much as creating challenges for the existing schools.”

Now you may be wondering, “Won’t that be weird to just repeat back what they’re saying?” Or you may think, “They just said it. How can it be helpful for me to say it back?”

Reflecting typically feels more awkward for the person doing it — i.e., you — than for the person hearing it. What I know, and what’s supported by considerable research, is that people like having their thoughts and feelings reflected back to them.

Just don’t repeat them back word for word. Use fewer words and summarize rather than transcribe. I call this “nuggetizing.” Get at the nugget of what they’re saying, and say it briefly so you don’t interrupt the flow. Focus on something that seems meaningful to the other person; pull out an idea that gets to the heart of what they’re saying. You could preface your reflection with one of these: “I hear that you’re saying,” “It sounds as though,” “So….”

The crucial role of reflection is to help people feel heard, and to make sure you understand them. It’s more important for you to simply be present than to be brilliant.

The 3rd active listening skill is asking open-ended questions

As you listen, questions will pop into your head, and you’ll want answers. While asking questions is very appealing, they have the potential to interrupt the other person’s thinking, shift the focus to your agenda, interfere with connection and derail a conversation.

To use questions effectively, keep a few things in mind:

Always attend and reflect before you ask a question. Understanding the other person and helping them feel understood provides a strong foundation. If you haven’t communicated that you heard someone, they may not be inclined to open up to your question.

You might feel like asking questions is how you best communicate your interest. That may be true but if you attend and reflect first, a question says, “I’m interested in what you just said” rather than “I’m interested in your response to what I want to hear about.”

When you do ask a question to promote dialogue, it’s most effective to use questions that are open-ended and cannot be answered simply with a “yes” or “no”. For example, rather than asking “Do you think public charter schools should receive the same level of funding as other public schools?” which can be answered “yes” or “no,” you might ask, “How do you think public charter schools should be funded?” Open-ended questions promote elaboration and exploration.

Just as in reflecting, you want to keep your questions simple. Resist the urge to try to guide or impress the other person with your exceptionally astute question.

One of my favorite and most concise ways to ask questions is simply to repeat back a key word with an upward intonation. For example, if somebody says, “I just feel like the world is so dangerous,” you can say “Dangerous?” By using the upward intonation, the word becomes a question. It says, “Tell me more about how the world is dangerous.”

It’s important to stay neutral in both tone and content. Judgment and opinion can come across loud and clear in your tone. Saying “Is that where you’re going on vacation?” is more contentious than “Tell me how you decided to go there for vacation” (which is a statement that’s really a question).

It’s also important to think about when to ask your question. Don’t interrupt the other person just to ask something.

The final thing to keep in mind about attending, reflecting and open-ended questions is that these tools are intended to help promote understanding by developing greater connection. Connection is the most important thing.

So if the tools aren’t working in a situation or if you’re able to have connection without these tools, don’t force them. That said, don’t underestimate them either. They’re backed by research and experience, and they can help you to navigate the unpredictable, challenging waters of dialogue with others.

Excerpted from the new book Beyond Your Bubble: How to Connect Across the Political Divide, Skills and Strategies for Conversations That Work by Tania Israel, PhD. Reprinted with permission from the American Psychological Association. Copyright © 2020 by American Psychological Association.

Watch Tania Israel‘s TEDxUCLA Talk here: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tania Israel PhD is a professor in the department of counseling, clinical and school psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She leads dialogue skill-building workshops to help people connect across political differences and teaches about helping skills, leadership and community collaboration. She has also facilitated educational programs and difficult dialogues on a range of topics, including abortion, law enforcement, religion and sexual orientation.

The PhD: Online learning for all

by Pat Thomson, Patter:  https://patthomson.net/2020/06/01/online-learning-for-all/

This is a guest post from Anna Pilson. Anna is a PhD student at Durham University School of Education. Her ESRC-funded project aims to create a participatory action research model that positions children with a vision impairment as knowledge producers and change agents. She tweets as @pilsonanna.

Now that the Covid-19 pandemic has radically altered the organisation of university life for the foreseeable future, ‘everyday ableism’ can be (unwittingly) perpetuated by virtual teaching methods. But we also have a potentially generative moment to change this narrative.

Given that in that academic year 2018/19, a sixth of all home university students declared that they had a disability, accessibility should be a central driver in the planning and delivery of Higher Education teaching and learning. Yet, as the Office for National Students states, real accessibility remains aspirational.

Moving online opens up all sorts of questions about (in)equality. Not just the bigger issues of digital access and digital literacy, but the nitty gritty of our planning and delivery. In an ideal world we would ensure that our online materials are accessible for all. We’d have British Sign Language interpretation, easy read materials, accessible transcripts. All of these things however, take time, expertise and money that we may not have immediately have access to. So, while I think that the Education sector should continue to strive for this idealism, in the meantime there are plenty of ways we as individuals can build in some simple strategies to improve our online teaching and communication straight away.

What can we do?

You may now be familiar (or perhaps overfamiliar!) with online learning and meeting platforms like Skype, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams and of course, Zoom. The great thing about all of these platforms is that they have in-built accessibility features that are really easy to apply, and can be used alongside some simple inclusive strategies to make online teaching accessible for all:

You can enable live captioning. This is when subtitles are generated in real time to present in text what the speaker is saying. This is really important for D/deaf or hard of hearing students, as this visual aid can compensate for the quite often variable video quality that might make lip reading difficult. However, captioning can of course also be beneficial to anyone with poor sound quality.

Don’t force your students to switch on their camera.  Being on camera can be really distracting, I mean, come on, we’ve all spent a good few minutes in a zoom meeting staring at ourselves, preening and sorting our hair out haven’t we? Not me of course, but hypothetically speaking (ahem). But in all seriousness, ‘Zoom Fatigue’ is becoming a common, and recognised, complaint. Navigating the dissonance caused by slight time delays between picture and sound can make participants feel uncomfortable, as can the loss of natural conversational rhythm. Also, the performative aspect of being ‘watched’ while having to be on camera may be anxiety-inducing.

The online environment can also make it difficult to take cues from body language, because often hand gestures can’t be seen and camera angles are not optimal, but actually this absence can enhance the quality of the verbal interaction taking place, because people are forced to articulate their meaning more clearly, which could be more inclusive for neurodivergent or visually-impaired students. So, you could switch off all cameras and instead use a moderator system, where one participant’s role is to note if and when participants wish to speak by looking for use of the ‘raise hand’ icon, or a note in chat. This can be used organise the order of speaking, and avoid people talking over one another, so as to make the flow of speech more coherent.

Provide transcripts/notes. Where possible do this in advance of the lecture, so that participants have the opportunity to organise notes, pre-empt any issues, set up screen readers or Braille displays, reformat the document according to personal need (for example, inverting colours of text/background, enlarging text, removing visual clutter), or familiarise themselves with the material beforehand, which can be really useful if they find concentration or retention of information difficult.

Consider the accessibility of the visual material you are sharing. Make sure any documents you provide use a sans serif font, which is easier to visually distinguish, such as Arial or Calibri. Ensure there is a good contrast between the colours of the font and background (e.g. black and white). Go for size 14 minimum and avoid too much use of italics or underlining. Any image should have a caption or descriptor. And any PDF should have optical character recognition enabled, which means it’s compatible with screen readers. This can be applied really easily in the settings of Adobe Acrobat or similar when creating a PDF.

Make your related Social Media presence accessible. A basic feature to be aware of is using ‘Camel Case’ in your hashtags. This means capitalising every the first letter of every word following a hashtag – for example, #ThisIsCamelCase but #thisisnotcamelcase. This means that screen readers read each individual word, as the beginning of each new word is denoted by the presence of a capital letter, rather than considering everything after the hashtag to be one long word.

The other key feature is to include image descriptors. Twitter was the first platform to offer built-in picture descriptors, known as alt text. To enable this function, go to ‘Settings and Privacy’, then ‘Accessibility’. Here you can select the option to ‘compose image descriptions’. If this is enabled, every time you upload an image there will automatically be the option to add an image descriptor and you will then get 420 characters to do so. Because Twitter doesn’t currently have in-built options to enlarge text, other than via external magnification software, using the aforementioned tips can be vital in enhancing accessibility.

Finally, by offering opportunities for asynchronous learning you can truly allow students to gain ownership of their learning. This can be done by recording meetings/ lectures using the in-built recording functions, so that participants can revisit them if they missed anything, or watch them on a schedule that suits their own personal needs. The disabled community have long recognised the tensions (and often incompatibility) between the demands of standardised timetables in education and their own needs. By embracing flexibility, we can make space for embedding what Alison Kafer famously called ‘Crip Time’ in our standard practice.

Accessibility for all

We need to remember that many of these new virtual ways of working have previously been denied to disabled students by institutions keen to stick to ‘conventional’ teaching methods. So make sure you acknowledge the fact that these online methods have been used and refined over time by disabled people in spaces outside academia. As such, don’t forget to ask for (and listen to) the expertise of your students.

Covid-19 has offered universities a unique window of opportunity to design online course materials to be as accessible as possible from the beginning, with accessibility at the heart and not just as a bolt-on. Universities also have a legal duty to try to remove the barriers students may face in education because of disability. This is called ‘making reasonable adjustments’. So, when you’re planning your online teaching, remember 2 things:

1. be reasonable, and 2. make adjustments.

And, in reality, these adjustments will be useful for all  students, not just those with disabilities.

Photo by Andres Jasso on Unsplash

INTERVIEW: A Sense of Belonging Matters. That’s Why Academic Culture Needs to Change

by Katie Langin, Science: https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2019/01/sense-belonging-matters-s-why-academic-culture-needs-change

For science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate students from underrepresented groups, such as racial and ethnic minorities and women, a sense of belonging—or lack thereof—can have a concrete effect on a crucial career component: their publication records. 

That’s the result of a study published earlier this month, which sheds light on the reasons behind previously  documented disparities in publishing rates and indicates how institutions’ structures and cultures bear part of the responsibility.

Female and minority graduate students published the same number of papers as their white male peers when they felt accepted by their mentors and peers, had clear departmental expectations, and felt prepared for their graduate classes, based on a survey of 341 graduate students pursuing physical science, computer science, mathematics, and engineering degrees at four universities in California. What this tells us, says Aaron Fisher, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the lead author of the study, is that the reason some students have lower productivity is because of their experience “being an outsider—being a minority—in an environment that was designed by and for the majority.”

The findings put a spotlight on cultural issues in academia that need to be addressed, says Stephen Thomas, the director of the Maryland Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland in College Park, who works on diversity issues in STEM but wasn’t involved in the new study. “I came up at a time when I was the first or only black student in my doctorate program, first or only [black] assistant professor in the tenure track, first or only tenured black faculty member,” Thomas says. “I came through that. But the scholars I’m training now, they don't want to be first. They don't want to go to institutions that don’t get it.”

Science Careers spoke with Thomas—who also serves as the associate director of the mentor training core at the National Institutes of Health’s National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN)—about his thoughts on the paper’s findings and what he thinks can be done to foster better institutional cultures in STEM. The discussion was edited for clarity and length.

Q: What’s your general reaction to the paper?

A: I found it quite fascinating that one of the areas that they highlight is psychological distress and how structure and a sense of belonging can be a pathway to success. It might be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you’re already perceived as less than and if you believe that—if you internalize that—then you will be less than.

Q: Why do you think students were more productive, and had a greater feeling of belonging in STEM, when they had clear departmental expectations?

A: I think it helps everybody, but especially minorities and women. Their social networks may not be as connected, so they may be less likely to be “in the know” when there’s an expectation that’s not written down.

For example, if a Ph.D. program requires that students submit a certain number of papers for publication before they graduate, then that should be explicit. If students know that’s an expectation, then they don't feel like they’re on the outs and that others have inside information that they don't have.

But it’s not enough to simply improve documentation. I think it's far more subtle, far more nuanced, than that. The structure must have a heart. And it has to be accompanied by other efforts to improve institutional culture.

Q: What are other parts of academic culture that you see as problematic?

A: Our young scholars need mentors that are advocates. Unfortunately, I have met many scholars who don’t have mentors; they have tormentors. Harassers. Psychological bullies. Some view that as a way to toughen young scholars up. But it’s also a form of abuse, in my opinion.

Stephen Thomas

THE MARYLAND CENTER FOR HEALTH EQUITY

Many senior scholars came through systems like that; they came through gauntlets. And if they made it through the gauntlet they were good enough. Now, as mentors, many of them operate using that same system, seeing that as the only way to build the next generation. That may well be fine when they’re dealing with white males or people who look like them or come from similar backgrounds. But when they’re dealing with racial and ethnic minorities and people who are the first generation in their families to graduate from college, that hazing—I’ll call it hazing, the gauntlet—is very, very oppressive.

Q: Your work with the NRMN involves doing hands-on mentor training with senior scientists. What’s the goal with that?

A: We’re training mentors to become more culturally aware. Some say, “I don’t need mentor training because I’ve been doing this for 40 years.” But it’s needed because senior faculty are now seeing young scholars coming through who don't look like them and who don't look like the Ph.D. cohort when they came through.

I think that many white males feel that they’re walking on eggshells when they’re dealing with issues of women and minorities. They’re afraid they are going to say something that offends someone and they kind of shut down. So when you do this kind of training, you’ve got to have facilitators who know how to make it OK for people to open up.

Q: What’s something that mentors can do to connect with mentees, even if they don’t look like them or share the same background?

A: It’s important to not be afraid to share your own vulnerabilities. For example, a faculty member told me that when he shared with his students that he had epilepsy—so that they weren't alarmed if something happened in the classroom—the minority students seemed to open up a bit more. They connected with him—not along issues of race, but around the fact that he’s had struggles too. He showed the students that just because he’s a white male, it doesn’t mean he’s had a cakewalk.

Many of my faculty colleagues feel uncomfortable disclosing vulnerabilities. Senior faculty have to recognize that one of the ways to change the culture, to break down the preconceived barriers, is to open up and share personal stories and experiences. In the end, for the mentees it doesn’t matter if their mentor looks like them. What matters is: Do they care?

Q: What kind of advice do you give young scholars who are from underrepresented groups?

A: I tell them that, yes, there is unfairness; yes, there is bias; yes, there is racism, structural discrimination—all those things are real. But you have to work to make connections with people.

That means that you can’t just lock your door and get your papers published—meanwhile, nobody knows you. This comes back to the whole sense of belonging. I belong because Sally down the hall can tell you what I do.

You should also find a peer group that you can open up with about personal struggles. If you’re alone, it’s easy for feelings of self-doubt to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if you’re in a place where there’s a critical mass of people going through what you’re going through and you have what I’ll call a brave space to talk about what’s going on—“I don't feel welcome,” for instance—then that can be really helpful.

Q: The article was, in part, about the number of papers students publish. Do you have any advice on that front?

A: Yes, I do. I’ve noticed that many young scholars are sitting on their work, waiting for perfection. They hold onto their work much too long in an attempt to get it into a high-impact journal. I tell scholars I’m mentoring that you cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is a cumulative process; you’re building a track record. What’s most important is that you get your work out there.

I’ve also noticed that women and minority scholars are more likely to want to get that full picture and less likely to want to publish little snippets as they go. There’s a balance. You don’t want to get in a mode of slicing your work too thinly. But there’s a reason slicing and dicing works. Each paper needs to tell one story, not six. So, it’s important to understand how you can segment your research in ways that help you tell individual stories and keep you productive.

I also highly encourage young scholars to send their publications to the very authors that they have cited, for instance by sending an email that says something along the lines of, “I thought you might find this article important. I cited your work.” Then those authors are aware of your work and they begin to cite you. You cannot assume that everyone’s doing a comprehensive literature review and that they’ll find your work. You have to get your work out there and be your own publicist, in a sense.

Senior people know the game. They cite each other; they build each other’s credibility in that way. If you’re an outsider trying to break in, you simply may not be aware of ways in which those that have keep having.