"The tutorial takes up where university speech-communication courses leave off." Excerpted from the Teacher's Communication-Skills Tutorial—written by Kerry (Tutorial Coach)

Explaination:

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 communication-skills workshops, 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 (as of 2/4/08), 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 resort to begging and threats (strikes) for financial parity with many of their former "C" students, now 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 send 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, or worse through Columbine-like incidents.. Here in Hawaii our SAT scores are among the lowest in the nation.

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 rather than raise its own standards for education majors such as teaching them how to communicate subject matter. 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 key 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?

The word is out. 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-supportive communication with their loved one.

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among

Now the obvious question. Why not?

Why don't university speech faculty teach education majors how to communicate subject matter so that all students get it?

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 to 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.

Notice that in most schools some students are forced to resort to graffiti to communicate their upsets, anger, resentments, and disrespect. This is a by-product of the present education major's Sp/Com curriculum.

For decades adults and teachers have not been taught how to express anger verbally, through to mutual satisfaction, or, how to get another's anger. Consequently some students must dramatize their anger in writing. Some even resort to physical (lately guns) violence. Many 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.

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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.

For more about this topic see The Teacher's Pay Conversations Project.

Back to the Overview

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Skill

Skill:

Skill is used here according to Dr. Paul Heinberg's Morphology of Human Learning, 1972, University of Hawaii, Sp/Com Dept. He illustrates on a chart three levels of learning; Cognitive, Behavioral and 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 create the illusion, or have agreement amongst friends and associates, 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.

The true measure of whether one has 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.

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.

Within Community Communications we hold 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. Only two of our 1099 communication workshop participants have achieved and sustained that skill. 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.

Back to the paragraph describing the word skill

Back to the Overview

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