Active Listening & Facilitating Conversations as a Peer Mentor

Welcome to the page on Active Listening & Facilitating Conversations as a Peer Mentor! As a mentor, your mentees may ask you about a range of topics from personal challenges to professional advice. Your role is to navigate these conversations thoughtfully, ensuring that your mentees feel heard and valued. Most often, these conversations will involve you carefully listening to your mentee, considering their goals and strengths, providing guidance or feedback as needed, and prompting your mentees to engage in conversations with you about their interests. This also means being cognizant of your role as a peer mentor, considering the balance between professional and personal relationships.

Below, we outline suggestions for navigating these conversions using two effective communication strategies: Active Listening and Facilitating Conversation. By prioritizing listening to understand, you can build trust and create a space in which your mentees feel comfortable asking questions and sharing their experiences and concerns. Developing skills in facilitating conversation will help you get to know your mentees better, and provide a deeper understanding of their thoughts, beliefs, and ideas. This section will equip you with the skills to enhance your listening abilities and provide suggestions to help you better understand, prompt conversations, and empower your mentees on their journey.

Active Listening

Active Listening is a communication technique in which the listener fully concentrates, understands, responds, and remembers what is being said by the person speaking. It involves hearing the words and engaging with the speaker's emotions and intentions. In mentor-mentee relationships, active listening facilitates deeper understanding which the mentor may use to provide meaningful feedback and guidance. It signals to mentees that their mentor cares about their thoughts, often leading to increased feelings of support. This contributes to developing open dialogue and growth within the mentor-mentee relationship.

Many of us may have heard of active listening and be familiar with the idea. However, putting active listening into practice can be difficult! Below, we outline several principles of active listening and an activity to help you think about how to be active when engaging with your mentees.

Principles of Active Listening

Focus on what is being said and give the speaker your undivided attention. Clear your mind of anything else, and don’t prejudge.
Repeat what you just heard and confirm with the speaker that it is accurate.
If you are unsure you understand, ask the speaker to expand or clarify; don’t assume.
Look for nonverbal signals, such as facial expressions and tone of voice, and confirm these just as you would verbal messages.
Listen carefully for any hidden requests behind the speaker’s statements. For instance, “I hate math” might really mean “I need help understanding this concept.”

Activity: Listening with Your Whole Body

Think of a person you consider an excellent listener. Picture that person clearly in your mind. Focus on what they do as well as what they say. Describe what actions and postures they use to show they are listening. What words do they say to indicate they are listening and the speaker feels heard?

Think of a person you consider a poor listener. This person can be fictional. Picture that person clearly in your mind. Focus on what they do and what they say. Describe what actions and postures they use to show they are not listening. What do they say to indicate that they are not listening?

Now, compare these lists with your own behavior. How many of the body language signals from each side do you think you exhibit? What phrases would you like to adopt, and what phrases should you omit? How can you add more of the left column’s attitudes and actions to your own behaviors? How can you control those behaviors you recognize in yourself from the right column?

Good vs Bad Qualities of Active Listening

Now that you’ve developed your own list of qualities and actions you believe impact active listening, take some time to compare your list with the list we have developed below. What did you think we missed?

Behaviors that Promote Active Listening	Behaviors that Detract From Active Listening
Full Attention: The listener focuses entirely on the speaker, avoiding distractions to understand the message deeply. This may look like closing their technology, offering a private setting, etc.	Distractions: External factors, like phones or multitasking, distract the listener, leading to misunderstandings.
Open-Ended Questions: The listener asks thoughtful, open-ended questions to encourage further discussion and exploration. This might look like, “How does this make you feel?” or “Can you tell me more about that?”	Interruptions: The listener frequently interrupts or cuts off the speaker, which can stifle communication and make the speaker feel undervalued. Interruptions can be well-intentioned, but allowing the person speaking to finish their thoughts before you ask questions is best.
Reflective Responses: The listener paraphrases or reflects back on what the speaker has said, ensuring clarity and building rapport. This might look like, “I understand you’re saying you feel ___” or “It seems like you’re looking for some more clarity from me; is that correct?”	Judgmental Responses: The listener responds with judgment or criticism, making the speaker feel defensive or unheard. A judgemental response might look like, “I’m surprised you’re still dealing with this; I thought you would have figured it out by now.”
Nonverbal Cues: The listener uses positive body language, such as eye contact and nodding, to show they are engaged and understanding.	Closed Body Language: The listener avoids eye contact, crosses arms, or exhibits other signs of disinterest, making the speaker feel dismissed.

                                                         Facilitating Conversations

To help facilitate meaningful conversations with peer mentees, you can employ "academically productive talk" (APT) strategies. This approach emphasizes creating a supportive dialogue environment where mentees feel encouraged to express their thoughts, reason deeply, and build on each other's ideas. The full resource on ATP developed by the Strategic Education Research Partnership can be found here. Below, we have summarized some of the concepts most relevant to peer mentor-mentee relationships.

Encourage Elaboration: Rather than asking mentees questions that result in yes or no answers, prompt mentees to expand on their ideas. Phrases like “Can you say more about that?” or “What do you mean by that?” allow your mentee to explain their idea further and provide you the opportunity to understand the mentee’s perspective better.

Probe Reasoning: Ask mentees to explain their thinking using questions such as “Why do you think that?” or “What evidence supports your idea?” Questions like these will help you better understand how mentees have developed their ideas.

Revoice Contributions: Restate your mentees’ responses to clarify your understanding and validate their input. Phrases like “From my understanding, you mean [restatement of your mentee words]. Is that correct?” are useful for revoicing mentee contributions.

Allow Wait Time: Give mentees time to think before responding. This allows them to be intentionally thoughtful and encourages inclusive dialogue by acknowledging not everyone will have something to say immediately.

Promote Collaboration: Encourage mentees to build on each other’s ideas or offer counterexamples to deepen discussions. This can be done by following up with mentees by using “encourage elaboration” phrases and probing reasoning, particularly in group settings.

Sequence Context: Highlight connections between earlier and later points in conversations. This might sound like, “Earlier, we talked about [topic]. How do you think that connects to what we’re talking about now?”

Mini Case Study

Case Scenario: You are in a one-on-one meeting with a mentee, and they are giving very short answers to your questions about their research interests. How do you encourage them to open up and elaborate on their thoughts?

Jot down your ideas on a scrap piece of paper! After you have come up with a few ideas on your own, click below to reveal our suggestions.

Click Here to Reveal Our Suggestions

Ask more open-ended questions that require them to explain further, such as, “What part of research interests you the most?” or “Can you share more about why this area is exciting to you?”
Use reflective listening to show understanding, saying things like, “It sounds like you’re really passionate about exploring [specific topic]. Is there anything you would like to accomplish with that research? It could be the development of some personal skills, too.”
Maintain encouraging body language, such as nodding and leaning slightly forward, to show you’re engaged in their answers. Smiling and keeping positive facial expressions can also assist.

Attributions

Academically Productive Talk by Catherine Snow (Harvard University) and Suzanne Donovan (SERP) is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA.

Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International license.