Learning to Listen: Teaching an Active Listening Strategy to Preservice Education Professionals

The importance of parent–teacher communication has been widely recognized; however, there is only limited research on teaching effective listening skills to education professionals. In this study, a pretest–posttest control group design was used to examine the effect of instruction on the active listening skills of preservice education professionals. Instruction resulted in statistically significant improvement for targeted active listening skills. As a measure of social validity, parents of preschool and school-age children viewed pre- and postinstruction videotapes of preservice education professionals in role-play conversations. The parents judged the postinstruction performances of the preservice education professionals to be better examples of effective communication than the preinstruction performances of the preservice education professionals.