Paraphrasing

The following is an excerpt, taken with permission, from Sam Kaner’s book: Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (New Society Publishers, 1996).

Why

How

Paraphrasing is a fundamental listening skill. It is the foundation for many other facilitative listening skills, including mirroring, gathering and drawing people out.
Paraphrasing has both a calming effect and a clarifying effect. It reassures the speaker that his or her ideas are worth listening to. And it provides the speaker with a chance to hear how his/her ideas are being heard by other.
Paraphrasing is especially useful on occasions when a speaker’s statements are convoluted or confusing. At such times, the paraphrase will help the speaker gauge how well his/her ideas are getting across.
In sum, paraphrasing is the tool of choice for supporting people to think out loud.

Use your own words to say what you think the speaker said.
If the speaker’s statement is one or two sentence, use roughly the same number of words when you paraphrase it.- If the speaker’s statement is many sentence long, summarize it.
Preface your paraphrase with a comment like one of these: “It sounds like what you’re saying is…”; “This is what I’m hearing you say…”; “Let me see if I’m understanding you…”
When you have completed the paraphrase, look for the speaker’s reaction. Say something like, “Did I get it?” Verbally or nonverbally, s/he will indicate whether or not s/he fells understood. If not, keep asking for clarification until you understand what s/he meant