Lesson 6: Encouraging / Paraphrasing / Summarizing


Attention


Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this lesson's material, students will be able to:

  • Identify key words in a client statement
  • Demonstrate the ability to paraphrase a client's statements
  • Demonstrate the ability to summarize a client's statements

Teaching

Listening

Listening is NOT a passive exercise!

How do we communicate that we are listening to someone?

  • Verbal tracking
  • Questions
  • Encouraging
  • Paraphrasing
  • Summarizing

Click HERE to visit a cool little website that covers the concepts of Encouragement, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing

Encouragement

  • Be sure to NOT confuse this skill with providing "Encouragement" as in to give someone more hope...that is a different skill. Encouragement in this regard is simply anything you do that keeps the client talking...
  • Repetition of key words
  • Direct statements
  • Simply reflecting what they are saying to you
  • Non-word utterances and gestures that encourage the person to continue talking

Paraphrasing

  • Restating the main point of a statement
  • Shortening a longer statement into a brief one
  • Using sentence stems such as "It seems to me that...", "What I hear you saying is..."
  • End with a check (when appropriate)..."Did I get that right?" or "Is that what you are saying?"

Summarizing

  • Bringing things together into a cohesive sentence or paragraph
  • This usually begins in a similar manner as the paraphrasing..."Let me see if I have this straight..." or "Let me summarize what I understand so far..."
  • You usually end with a check as well..."Did I get that right?"

Assessment

Lesson 6 Assignment

One of the important ways we communicate to our clients that we are listening is through the use of encouragement, paraphrasing, and summarizing. All the while we are continually tracking what they are saying and providing feedback that we are "there" with them.

For this assignment your instructor is going to provide you with access to an iMovie file that you can edit on your iPad.

The video file is a brief counseling session in which there are numerous instances of encouragement and paraphrasing...the session then ends just prior to the counselor summarizing what has been stated so far in the session.

Using iMovie on your iPad you are going to edit the movie file. Each time you notice that the counselor has used an "encourager" or has "paraphrased" something, insert a title text into the movie. At the end of the movie, the counselor is about to summarize what the client said...record an audio track at the end of the movie with your own version of the summary.

You will be exporting your movie to your YouTube Channel and submitting a link to it in the assignment drop box.

A video tutorial on this process is available in the iTunes U course.