Communication Literacy

Perhaps the phrase strikes you as redundant, but it’s the term I use to describe the broad range of communication skills that our students will need to successfully navigate the 21st-century world. And yet, the traditional focus on the 2 Rs (reading and writing) remains the entrenched standard - partly because those skills are relatively easy to test. Sadly, we appear to have created a generation who has only learned to write the 500-word exposition, with the teacher as the only audience. But this does not serve our children well, nor society at large.

For example, we should spend more time talking about video: (e.g., Teachers look to film to foster critical thinking).  It could be argued that in the last half-century, movies have had a greater  impact on the culture and mindset of modern society than the written word - but unless you’re a college film major, video communication is not studied in any meaningful way. As a result, we are largely unaware of its power and influence. (which is why tv commercials are so effective at selling soap and everything else.)

Here’s another example: there are few good jobs today that don’t require competence in public speaking, yet that’s not an area of focus, either. (Not conducive to standardized testing?)  Many of us consider standing behind a podium a fate worse than death. But what if speaking to an audience became a standard part of the education experience, beginning in the earliest grades? I’ve seen it, and it’s impressive when done well. (Aside: what if the focus of classroom participation became less about “knowing the right answer” and more about contributing to the learning of the entire class? A subject for another day.)

As anyone who’s sat through a dreadful powerpoint presentation can attest, there is much more to effective public communication than standing up and delivering information.
    You have to get the audience’s attention in the first 20 seconds, and hold it!
    You have to know your audience, and adjust your presentation accordingly.
     - occasionally, in real time
    You have to speak in a language your audience understands
      - particularly challenging for engineers and accountants!
To think all this can be assimilated in the standard first-year college course is beyond optimistic.

But even if your audience is as a small as one or two, there is a lot of communication to which we don’t pay enough attention. It’s been estimated that over 90% of person-to-person communication is non-verbal. (That’s why phone conferencing doesn’t work as well as face-to-face.) And at least 50% of communication involves listening - which means that the development of empathy needs to become a central part of the educational experience. 

Not to be confused with sympathy, having empathy for another perspective does not require that you agree with it.  Empathy is the ability to understand why another person thinks differently.  Of course, this has always been an important part of literature – what is the character’s motivation? – but seldom do we relate it (make it relevant?) to our own communications. But consider the impact on our civic culture – not to mention personal relationships - if we had more empathy!

Communication is closely tied to all the other 21st-century skills. Without communication you can’t have collaboration, and what good is critical-thinking or creativity if you can’t communicate your ideas?  Every aspect of civic literacy – an often overlooked, yet essential component of a quality education -  involves either communicating clearly, or listening clearly.

The ability to communicate effectively is right at the top of the list of the skills our students need, and what they need goes well beyond the reading and writing that we obsessively measure and test.

The ‘Core’ of Professional Development

New wine requires new wineskins 

In Allison Gulamhussein’s outstanding article in ASBJ, “Professional Development and the Common Core”, she lays out what I believe could be a framework for broad, systemic education reform. That’s a big deal – and  doable -  but it would require effort and patience. Note: I’ve borrowed the original print title and liberally from the article itself. 

Beginning with this: “research consistently shows that teachers predominately ask students fact-recall questions, and studies analyzing classroom instruction have found that 85 percent of instruction is lecture, recitation, or seatwork, activities which often require very little critical thought.” Further, it was found that “the following were rarely seen in classrooms: student participation in meaning-making and reasoning, investigation and problem-based approaches, questioning strategies, and student generation of ideas and questions.”  

(Note: while this ‘traditional’ approach is not universal, it’s probably safe to assume that it remains most prevalent in the schools with the highest proportion of struggling students – the schools that lack the resources, both financial and in the teaching environment, to attract and support quality teachers.) But I digress.

This is the issue that the Common Core was designed to address, and the reason I continue to believe that much of the criticism of the CC is misplaced – the CC actually points us in the right direction, away from rote memorization and towards the development of critical thinking.  But it is grossly unrealistic to think that we can change a century of teaching practice overnight – especially when we haven’t put in place the kind of supports that teachers will need to make this work. 

So, what is the plan?  Typically, it’s ‘professional development’ of the workshop variety. (And as recently noted in this article, not enough teachers have received even that.) 

 

But what does the research say? “Despite its prevalence, the workshop model’s track record for changing teachers’ practice … is abysmal… a comprehensive study of professional development research found that programs shorter than 14 hours (such as workshops) had no effect on student achievement.”

Why not?  “Traditional forms (of PD) are based on the assumption that the biggest challenge facing teachers is “a lack of knowledge of effective practice.” However, the challenge for teachers isn’t in “acquiring knowledge of new strategies, but in implementing those strategies in the classroom.” Which, if you think about it, is true of  learning any new, complex skill: “first attempts to integrate new skills into practice are awkward, often requiring several practices before the skill is mastered.”

Again, the research: “With traditional professional development, only 10 percent of teachers transfer the skill. However, when supported during implementation, 95 percent of teachers transferred the new skill into their classrooms.”

And what would quality support look like?  “Support takes two forms: coaching and collaboration (an example of which is) the professional learning community – a group of teachers teaching the same content who innovate together and support each other.” 

This brings up the issue of capacity. In our high school, each principal will be responsible for hundreds of quality, time-intensive teaching evaluations each year. Where will they find the time to do this in addition to their current responsibilities? - another reason why the coaching and collaboration models that Allison mentions will be so important. (The development of which will require that schools make an intentional effort to develop cultures of cooperation and trust.)  For many schools, this will be a new and time-consuming task. 

It’s also going to take years to develop reliable and appropriate assessments for these new skills – for both students and teachers. I am deeply skeptical that the ‘bubble tests’ that have been developed to measure “student achievement” (i.e., PA’s Keystone exams) are even remotely capable of this. But there is a similar issue in regards to teaching assessments.

While Pennsylvania’s adoption of the Charlotte Danielson model of teacher evaluation is clearly a step in the right direction, how much professional development have principals received?  One 2-day workshop? (See paragraph six, above.)  It’s going to take years for principals – the primary teacher evaluators  - to get this right.  In the meantime, what are the checks and balances?  Yet we are placing enormous stakes on the outcomes of  these evaluations.

As Gulamhussein notes with justifiable irony: “traditional professional development aims to show teachers how to implement a model of learning that professional development itself ignores when training teachers.”