This blog is Part 1 of 3.
Through these three blogs, we’re going to think about communication and how you, the teacher, can communicate effectively, for the benefit of your learners.
Introduction
Teaching, at heart, is predicated on the interactions that take place between teachers and learners.
These interactions rest on communication.
Everything you do as a teacher should be viewed, at least in part, through the lens of communication.
To do that, you can ask yourself at each step:
- How effectively am I communicating?
You may also wish to ask yourself a connected question:
- How effectively am I facilitating communication between learners?
The latter is important, but the former takes precedence.
To that end, I’ll focus here on how you can ensure your communication is as effective as possible.
Employing the techniques and strategies I’m going to share will help you refine and improve how you convey your expectations, explain ideas, pose questions, build rapport and maximise progress.
And we will start at the beginning, with the essentials of good communication.
The Essentials of Good Communication
Audience. Purpose. Medium. Message.
Those are the essentials.
Whenever you are looking to communicate well, return to these four words and ask yourself if you are confident with each.
If you are, your communication will be effective.
Let me provide some analysis of each one.
Audience
Knowing your audience means knowing who you are seeking to communicate with.
In the classroom, this means you understand who your learners are, where they are at in terms of their development, what they know, what they don’t know, how they are best able to learn, and what engages or motivates them.
If you possess this information, you can tailor your communication, so it fits with the learners in question.
In short, knowing more about the classes you teach gives you a better chance of communicating with them effectively.
With that said, the simple fact of paying attention to your audience will lead to an immediate improvement in the quality of your planning and teaching.
For example, if you think carefully about the type of learners in your class and the prior knowledge they possess, you can use this information to tailor your lesson plans (including your resources) as well as the explanations you give and the questions you ask.
Purpose
By purpose, I mean your purpose.
What purpose underpins your communication?
Identifying and refining your purpose means having a clearer sense of why you are communicating and what you hope to achieve as a result.
If you know your purpose, life becomes easier.
It drives your communication, guiding it.
And don’t forget, the communication you do as a teacher includes the resources you create as well as the feedback you give and the teaching you do.
At each point of the cycle (planning, teaching and marking), communication is central.
Medium
This leads us onto medium.
The medium is the means through which you communicate.
It includes your voice, your body (body language), any slides you use, physical resources, multimedia resources like videos, and, in music, the sounds you create with instruments.
The medium affects the message.
So, for example, explanations provided verbally are qualitatively different from explanations provided in writing on a PowerPoint slide.
One brief illustration to secure the point.
Consider how the shape of a PowerPoint slide influences the structure of what you communicate through it.
Now, compare this to the shape of verbal communication (does it even have a shape?).
When communicating with learners, think about how the medium influences your attempts to convey a message.
For example, it is often best to deliver written and verbal instructions to learners at the beginning of a task.
This allows learners to test their understanding of the former against the latter, giving them confidence they have correctly understood both.
Also, through verbal instructions you can inject a sense of pace, whereas written instructions provide a reminder to which learners can refer while an activity is ongoing.
Message
Here we have our final essential element of effective communication and, arguably, our most important.
The message.
That is, the meaning we are seeking to convey.
Having elicited information about our audience, defined our purpose and assessed the media through which we will communicate, we now find ourselves well placed to craft messages that are accessible, relevant and that stimulate learning.
For example, a highly effective teacher may communicate differently with two different classes.
This would be predicated on their understanding of the different audiences, their acknowledgement of slightly contrasting purposes, and an analysis of which media are likely to be most effective in each case.
Through this little bit of prior work, they place themselves in a strong position from which to shape messages that will be accurately understood, sufficiently challenging, connected to prior learning and, as a result, able to stimulate the most learning possible.
To contextualise these points further, observe two teachers in your training school – one who you know is a good communicator and one who perhaps struggles with this side of things.
The point is not to develop a critical narrative about the latter.
Instead, it is to see in real terms what the contrast is like between the two.
This contrast will demonstrate what has been said above.
It will also further reinforce the point that paying attention to the essentials – audience, purpose, medium, message – even if only through a brief period of thought and analysis, is always preferable to the opposite.
With our groundwork complete, we can use the next two blogs to look at practical examples.
