Helping students to improve their communication skills…
In many aspects of life, effective communication skills are fundamental to achieving success. The classroom atmosphere heavily depends on the standard of communication that’s taking place. Unsatisfactory levels of communication will overall produce a negative outcome in the classroom.
Education today thoroughly expresses the importance of preparing students to be exceptionally professional. Effective communication is essential to become a professional, no matter what job path a student may desire. Students with excellent communication skills will ultimately gain more from their experience in class.
So, how can teachers help students to develop communication skills?
· Communication does not only involve the speaker, but also the ones or one that listen to the speaker. Effective communication skills can be developed through not only speaking well, but listening well. When a teacher, or other student in the class is speaking, teaching the rest of the class to be respectful is crucial, as this lies within communication skills. Teaching this as early as possible in the year can play a huge part in sticking with that student forever.
· To ameliorate communication skills, it is vital to motivate the students to engage in conversation. Some students may not want to talk at all, making it difficult for them to show their feelings properly. So you need to motivate them to be involved in activities. Support talks are a great idea to commence communication with the shy students. In this way, the support you offer is a step ladder to establishing stronger communication in students.
· Our traffic light feature provides a way for students to feedback to the teacher about how they get on in the lesson, or how they find a certain topic. The red, amber and green buttons reflect their feelings on whatever the teacher asks. For example, the teacher may ask “How did we find that topic” and the students can choose the red button for ‘Not confident’, the amber button for ‘Fairly confident’ and green for ‘Fully confident’. Only the teacher can see this, which may battle the worry of other students seeing their feedback. Based on the feedback, the teacher can individually help them. Consequently, it also offers a step ladder for students to develop more effective communication skills.
· Another idea is to utilise the simple but super effective technique of Group Tasking. This not only helps the student familiarise themselves with the work and content, but also boosts their confidence to speak with other students and well, improve their communication skills. A great example would be to assign each member of a group with a topic they have to research. Then, they can all feedback to the group about what they found. With this technique however, moderation is a must. Yes, you will get the students that will always want to be with their friends in a group. However, I believe that randomising the groups or choosing them yourself is just as effective as it helps enhance their communication skills with a person who is relatively unfamiliar to them. This is so they are not used to just communicating with you, or their friends, who are close to them. As well as group tasking, a way of teaching them to communicate with other classmates is a group debate. Similarly, this helps them communicate with the majority of the class.
Effective communication skills are amid the most valuable things you will learn. Developing these skills can be done in a wide range of ways and produces significant results that’ll elevate a student’s career. They assist in making a substantial impression. They allow you to engage in clear conversation, and most importantly, they can have a great impact on your student.