What does communication mean to you?
To me, I have always thought that communication is the simplest and effortless way of letting others know my thoughts and feelings. All I need to do is to open my mouth and speak whatever that comes to my mind. I assume that my intended recipents understand my messages and hence the ideas that I am trying to put across to them.
However, through the lesson on ‘Effective Communication’, I have learnt that this assumption is often the root of all disputes. If people do not express their message clearly and unambiguously, it is highly likely that the intended meaning behind each message is distorted. Therefore many misunderstandings are bound to arise.
Indeed, being able to communicate effectively is important, be it in school, work or at home. In school, when doing an oral presentation, it is essential for us to deliver our speeches and ideas concisely, so that our audience can understand our project’s aims. At work, it is important for the officers in the top management to communicate well with their fellow surbodinates, so that strong working bonds can be forged, leading to an efficient workteam. At home, if parents are able to communicate effectively with their children or vice versa, parent-child understanding will be brought to a higher level and hence strong family bonds can be forged. This applies the same to friendships and relationships, which deep trust and understanding are established through communication.
I would like to use a short personal incident of mine to complement the importance of effective communication. This incident happened a month ago, between me and my tutee named Fredric. And this was how it went:
I was trying to teach him geometry as part of the Primary 3 Mathematics syllabus, and we came across questions on parallel and perpendicular lines. So I asked him if he knew how to distinguish between the two different sets of lines. He shook his head. I drew the lines on a piece of paper and told him that if the two lines did not meet each other, they were considered as parallel; if the two lines did intersect with each other, then they were considered as perpendicular and hence had a angle of 90o. However, I forgot to emphasize that the small square that appeared between the intersected lines was a symbol representing an angle of 90o. In the end, for questions that did not have the small square symbol, he assumed that the answers were 90o.
So there you see, if I am able to express my thoughts in a clear, precise and organised way at that time, he may be able to grasp the correct concept.
I hope through all the practices in this module, I am able to emerge as a skilled ‘artist’, for communication is an art!
7 comments:
I loved the example, Weiying.
Also leads me to feel that the better we are at something, the more complicated we tend to make it look.
From my Harry Potter days, I remember Dumbledore saying 'The biggest mistake adults make is that they forget what it is to be kids'. One of the big difficulties as a teacher, similarly, is to unlearn first and then re-learn by teaching.
As a teacher once put it- 'Learn, Unlearn and Re-learn. That's all life is about..'
Hope to apply it during the next few weeks!
hello WeiYing,
It is really nice that you shared your real life experience. It actually kept me anticipated while reading your blog. Nice!
Thinking back now, I remembered there are many times in life when I tend to assume whatever that I know, people I am communicating with will also know. Often, we may tend to forget that everybody has a different background knowledge and perspective. As such, we tend to skip important elaborations when we are sending our message across in a conversation. Inevitably, this usually lead to confusion and misinterpretation of the message. " Sorry, I don't quite understand what you are trying to say" is an example of how people will normally respond to such a case of communication breakdown. Therefore, I feel that it is important we take the initiative to understand our audience. By observing their body language, we will know whether further elaborations are needed or not. And we should never be too lazy to skip explanations just because we want to quickly get the message across. By assuming that others will understand the message, especially towards people who are from different field of experience or younger audiences will definitely lead to unnecessary confusion which can otherwise be avoided.
I love Rohan's example from Harry Potter, and yes I do remember Dumbledore saying that. It is really a good reminder of how important it is to unlearn first before we can re-learn by teaching. I will also try to keep that in mind and apply in my daily life!
To Rohan: Thanks for commenting! I'll bear these golden words of wisdom in mind and remind myself to unlearn first and then relearn before and after each tuition class. I guess in this way, my tutee will have a better understanding and clearer picture of the concepts that I am trying to teach him.
To Diana: Thanks for commenting! I agree with you that we shouldn't be too lazy in our explanations, for we may add in more confusions, and hence making ourselves hard to be understood by our audience. I admit that there are times when I feel tired, I tend to brush through certain concepts and explain them briefly to my tutee. I guess it's time for me to kick off this bad habit, before my tutee's grades start to deteriorate.
Dear Weiying,
I strongly agree with you that many of us perceive that our intended recipients understand what we are trying to put across to them in our everyday life, be it in school, at the workplace or at home. Apart from the possibility that we are not able to clearly express our ideas across to the other party, this assumption of our recipients being able to understand us is definitely dangerous. This is because different people have different perspectives and different interpretations of a same thing. What we may view as "nice", "good" or "correct" in our opinion may not be true for others. Hence, many things in life tend to be subjective, where things may not be absolute or black and white. When we make this simplifying assumption, we put ourselves in the risk of neglecting to ensure that we put forth our opinions and messages effectively.
It is good that you share your own personal experience in your post. I share a similar experience as you. When I used to tutor a student of mine, I often find myself struggling to explain the concepts clearly to my students. Sometimes when they claim that they understand the concepts that I have taught, upon testing them using a different question, I realised that they have not grasped these concepts at all. It tends to get frustrating when we feel that these concepts are not that difficult to understand, yet after giving our self-perceived clear explanations, the students still have problems understanding them. All these boils down to the fact that different people perceive things differently. What I may think as a clear explanation may be confusing to others. What may seem easy to me may be very difficult to others. Hence, we need to put ourselves into the shoes of our audience and try to understand their backgrounds and needs before conveying our message across to them. Only with this understanding of our audience can a more effective communication be established.
Hi Wei Ying!
I totally agree with you, Diana and Peirong that it is often that people communicate with the mindset that their recipients think along the same lines as them, that miscommunications arise. This is not only so in teaching, but even in everyday communication. I realize I often commit this mistake, unknowingly. Thanks for pointing it out!
Dear Wei Ying,
I like the way you move from the general to the specific in this post. A summary of the value of effective comm skills would have seemed dry and perhaps stilted if you had not then related it to your own experience with the very appropriate example from your own teaching.
You also write with good fluency, and you present your ideas clearly and concisely (adhering well to the various 7Cs).
Thank you for this fine effort. I look forward to reading more from you.
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