Listening Courses for Young People

Giving Young People a channel to Listen to their world

DVD: Log In Listen In

Acorn has been working for some years in training young people in the liberating power of good Listening. A significant number of schools have used our Listening training at the heart of their buddy system, in which young people on the edge are helped to find their way forward through the problems they encounter.

Acorn is highly regarded for its creative and interactive style of training materials and has produced a DVD course called Log In Listen In. This course helps students to experience and appreciate the importance of Listening especially when someone wants to talk about something significant in their lives. More...

Learning to Listen

Available to secondary schools and youth clubs, this course is led by trained tutors. The aim is to teach young people the gift of offering good listening to each other. The course comprises of 6 sessions, a two-day fast track course to prepare suitably qualified and experienced adults to become course tutors and a third day of training designed specifically for both Fast Track and Acorn adult tutors wanting to work in schools.

It is well known that youngsters will be more open and frank with their contemporaries than with adults, however approachable adults may be. With this in mind, many schools run informal schemes, such as Buddy Support and Trust and Tell, or formal schemes such as Circle Time.

Learning to Listen supports initiatives like these which are already in place and can also provide a foundation to get good listening active and accessible for Young People.
This course has been specifically designed to:

• Raise awareness of the power of listening in schools
• Equip older teenagers with some of the skills needed to listen to younger teenagers

The course has been specially adapted by Mrs Heather Housden, Acorn’s former Schools Worker, a Schools Inspector and former Head Teacher. This “Learning to Listen” course can provide the basic training of pupils in buddy schemes, school training and mentoring programmes.

Course outline: Designed to be tutored by experienced and trained Acorn Christian Listeners and teachers.

Duration: 6 week course, each session running for approximately 2 hours.

Three essential elements: listening to ourselves, listening to others and listening to God.

Specifics: Two sessions focus on bullying in different forms. The course has an essentially Christian focus. Less specifically Christian meditations are available to accommodate other world faiths. The course has been successfully piloted in Chigwell School which is predominantly Muslim and in 40 other secondary schools, throughout the UK.

For more information please contact our Schools' Coordinator,  Barbara Oakley.