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Overview: continued
".... The tutorial takes up where university
speech/communication courses leave off."
Excerpted from our free
Teacher's Communication Skills Tutorial—for
a teacher who has a student who is failing.
Note:
If you have perpetrations about your education this will
be an extremely difficult passage to read from beginning
to end. Notice where you go unconscious and want to stop
reading—that subject is your barrier to being a safe
space for others to tell you the truth.
Following explains what I mean by "this tutorial takes
up where university courses leave off."
I
started out my Speech/Communication career as a
part-time Instructor for the University of Hawaii. After
a few semesters I left and started my own communication
skills consulting business. I presented/facilitated communication
skills workshops and support groups and
consulted for 24 years. Then, with
a better sense of what skills were wanted and needed out
in the real world, I returned to the UH to teach Sp/Com
classes part-time.
I was
shocked to discover that the Sp/Com curriculum had not
changed in the two decades I had been gone. This is not an
exaggeration. The Sp/Com faculty were, and still are, using
and teaching the
exact same us/them Adversarial Communication Model—it's
easily identified by a user's addiction to blaming and
badmouthing. This (Sender, Receiver, Message, Noise)
model, this way of communicating, produces predicable
results. Teachers are taught to present, as opposed to
communicate, subject matter; consequently here in Hawaii
our SAT scores are among the lowest in the
nation. Teachers resort to begging and threats
(strikes) for financial parity with skilled laborers,
continually blaming legislators/governors for their low
salaries, blind to the fact their pay mirrors their
communication skills. A significant percentage of
parents thwart/sabotage teachers, sending their child to
school with homework not done completely, accurately, or
neatly. The adversarial communication model
causes/inspires/enrolls some parents to attend PTA
functions and others to not. And, it forces some
students to express their upsets, frustrations, and
anger, through graffiti, some by bullying, others
through violence.
Worse yet, two decades
later, a third of my
freshman students had been tested and were found to be
unprepared for college. They were enrolled in remedial reading
and writing classes.
In other words, to survive
financially, the
university has lowered its standards. The university
has resorted to accepting
freshman who aren't prepared for continuing education.
This policy supports and rewards high school
teachers for not communicating subject matter. It also
rewards the university Sp/Com faculty, the ones who
did not teach education
majors how to communication subject matter.
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It is obvious that something
about how we are teaching education majors to
communicate subject matter is not working.
It's important to know that the
mandate of a speech/communication department is:
1) To inform students about the
speech-communication process
2) To introduce students to the
fundamentals and principles of speech and
communication.
The buzz words here are
"inform" and "introduce." This
is quite a bit different than the criteria for, say, brain surgeons, "…informed and introduced to
brains," hopefully not.
Can we talk?
Everyone knows that university Sp/Com classes are
among the
easiest to get A's.
The Sp/Com course
descriptions for education majors do not read, "To
teach prospective teachers to communicate subject
matter through to a skill level."
Virtually all divorced couples will acknowledge that the
main reason for their divorce was a communication
problem yet none return to ask any of their former
sp/com teachers for advice on how to get back into
loving communication with their loved one.
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Now the obvious question. Why not?
Why don't
university speech-communication courses teach communication to
education majors to a skill level?
To teach communication at the
level of skill
the curriculum must include the subject of anger.
That
is to say, an education major must have real-time
proficiency communicating, getting, and being-with, anger.
Such a curriculum is experiential,
hands-on, and powerful.
During such a curriculum:
1) A student learns to communicate
anger in a way that completes it and allows for the
listener to feel good upon completion.
Each student acknowledges and completes his/her own dormant residual
anger, the unresolved upsets and invalidations left
over from countless childhood conversations
(interactions), the anger we've been taught to
control—the anger we unconsciously carry around that
gets expressed covertly or overtly when triggered.
The skill comes from learning to
communicate anger in a way that uplifts and forwards
another.
2) A student
learns how to "get"
another's anger.
As teachers, citizens and parents we
must know how to acknowledge and recreate another
person's anger. Once I "get" a person's
anger, they no longer have it.
3) A
student becomes proficient in being with anger.
Whereas the unskilled teacher will react automatically
(they lost their choice not react long ago) the
skilled teacher has the ability to just be with anger
and not do anything with it. No judgments, no
punishments. In so doing, a teacher becomes a safe
space for communication to take place.
For decades adults/teachers have not been
taught how to express anger verbally, through to mutual
satisfaction, or, how to get another's anger.
Consequently some students just fail. Failing is one way a student
punishes others for not getting into communication with
them.
Every
teen student who has resorted to expressing anger with a
gun was previously dramatizing their anger, their
incompleteness, on their face. It's an easily
recognizable non verbal communication. Not one teacher
in any of the school-shootings had the ability to
recognize it, or if they did, the communication skills
to get it. Most teachers will see an unhappy, sulking
face and try to get into communication with the student
and fail, They then give up on the student forcing the
student to take it to the next level so as to be gotten.
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Why don't colleges and
universities teach education majors how to acknowledge
and complete their own anger and how to get another's
anger?
The answer is simply that
universities can't afford to have students quit in
anger. On the other hand, a communicologist, a communication
skills coach, is totally willing to have a student quit.
Explanation:
One of the coping skills (tricks) we've learned
is how to get someone to back off, to stop handling our case. When
someone is close to seeing through our act we use
anger to get them off of our back. It works
exceptionally well. Most people are afraid of
another's anger.
Universities are dependant upon
tuitions. Quitting students have a disastrous effect on
the financial stability of a university. Consequently,
education majors are given a watered down Sp/Com curriculum.
For more about how students use anger.
For more about the speech-communication curriculum for
teachers.
For
more about this topic see
The Teacher's Pay Conversations
Project.
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This is why I say, this
tutorial
takes up where university Sp/Com curriculums leave off.
If you elect to do this
tutorial
upset/anger will definitely come up for you.
The trick is to tell the truth.
What is your anger about? It's seldom about the other
person. Except for people who communicate openly and
honestly (zero thoughts withheld) as a way of life, most
anger is about something else, something similar, an earlier
experience in your childhood, an incomplete
communication, that you have yet to complete.
Back to the Overview
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Skill
Skill:
Skill is used here according to Dr. Paul Heinberg's Morphology
of Human Learning, University of Hawaii, Sp/Com Dept., 1972, He
illustrates on a chart three levels of learning; Cognitive, Behavioral and
Affective.
You understand how to ride a bike (cognitive), you can ride and demonstrate to
another than you can ride a bike (behavioral), and, from being taught you end
up liking bikes so much that you read all about them, perhaps making some
aspect of bikes a profession (affective).
Each of these variables are measured in terms of Competence, Performance and
Skill.
For our purpose most speech teachers know/understand (Cognitive) the
communication process. They can explain it (Behavioral) and many study the
subject in their free time and may even able to turn others on to the subject
(Affective). They also may be able to create the illusion, or have agreement
amongst friends and associates, (President Reagan, "The Great Communicator")
that they are effective communicators and get great student evaluations
(Behavioral & Performance).
However, what's missing at the higher education level are communication
standards for someone in the process of becoming a teacher to
achieve. Communication is not being taught to a any level of skill.
The true measure of whether you have learned, say's Dr. Heinberg,
is whether you are skilled. There must be agreement in the community,
or amongst educators, that you are planning to achieve some self
specified environmental change and are actively innovating your plan. You must
be effecting, through your communication skills, a social structure consistent
with your integrity and intentions.
To paraphrase Werner Erhard, the founder of The Forum,
there must be agreement in the community that you have demonstrated the ability:
1) to work outside of agreement, of what's accepted
2) to implement your creations, your innovations.
In other words, ask yourself, what three people in your community would
attest that you have designed and successfully implemented something, which at
the beginning no one supported.
Put another way. You created something, (from nothing, you didn't
change/add to an existing something), and through
intention (communication-skills) manifested it, in a space in which there was
no agreement that it could be done.
I am clear that you, the reader, have planned and are in the process of
innovating a specific environmental/social/organizational change, however your
upcoming challenge has to do with ethics and integrity.
The measure of whether you are a skilled communicator is
whether you can be trusted to tell the truth at all times, and, if
you are the space in which the truth is told at all times. That
takes skill and the skill is not being taught to a criteria in our
higher education system. In part the reason it's not taught is
because those who teach speech/communication sincerely believe they
cannot tell the truth at all times to everyone or they would lose
their job.
There are those in the process of becoming teachers and there
are teachers. A teacher is committed to service and forwards
others. Those in the process of becoming teachers practice
becoming skilled and have students who fail.
Community Communications holds to the standard that
anyone who wishes to facilitate workshops must complete the
Co-Facilitator's Training Program. To complete it one must have
unanimous agreement from the board of directors and all workshop
participants that they are in fact skilled. By our standards a
skilled communicator can be trusted to tell the truth, has a
reputation for keeping agreements, is the space
in which the truth is told and has consistently demonstrated an
ability to engage in difficult conversations, communicating
responsibly, from cause, through to everyone's satisfaction. Most
importantly, a workshop facilitator consistently demonstrates the ability to
recreate another's creations. In lay terms this means they are a team player,
that they have demonstrated the ability to manifest a workshop to the
standards set by another facilitator.
Only two of our 1099 communication workshop participants have completed
the Co-Facilitator's Training Program. It's not something one achieves and holds
on to for life. It has to be worked on daily. It requires a
willingness to operate from impeccable integrity and a willingness
to be supported.
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