Effective Communication and Instructional Techniques

1. Effective Communication and Instructional Techniques Dr. Eli Collins-Brown AET520 Instructional Strategies in Adult Education and Training University of Phoenix

2. Teacher/trainer as Facilitator • Shift from knowledge disseminator to facilitator • Need communication, interpersonal and group skills • Awareness of self and others • Knowledge of own culture and other’s • Analyze own feelings • Understand power of role modeling • Sense of ethics • Determine degree of responsibility for others and yourself • Good communication skills send clear messages in a sensitive way

3. Components of Effective Communication • Oral Communication • Audibility • Clarity • Enunciation • Variation and emphasis • Language usage • Mannerisms

4. Components of Effective Communication • Nonverbal Communication • Facial Expression • Movement • Gestures • Mannerisms • Eye contact • Silence • Physical contact

5. Listening Skills • Put all of your energy into listening • Be aware of your own filters when listening • Do not argue mentally • Restrain you impulse to immediately answer questions • When in doubt about whether to list or to speak, keep listening • Do not assume that you have to do anything but listen • Work at listening • Listen generously with a willingness to be influenced

6. Interpersonal Skills • Understanding others • Paraphrasing • Perception Checking • Being Understood by Others • Feeling Description • Behavior Description

7. Paraphrasing • Message received is the same as was intended by speaker • Ensures understanding of information, ideas, and suggestions of others • Guidelines • Be non-judgmental • Put the statement into your own words • Be attentive, interested and open to ideas • Listen for the feeling behind the words

8. Perception Checking • Used to ensure that you are interpreting another person’s feelings correctly • Direct checking – what I am hearing, is that correct? • Indirect checking – listen more carefully, attention to non-verbal cues

9. Being Understood • Feelings Description – this is how I feel • Behavior Description – you did this so I responded this way • What we think we observed • Describe behaviors so others know what you observed and are responding to

10. Assessment and Evaluation • Used by teachers to better understand students • discover abilities, interests and motivations • Assessment – make judgments about student progress and teacher’s instruction • Evaluation – make judgments about achievement of learning objectives or on the value or effectiveness of a program

11. Summative Assessment • Learner’s master of specific course material • Comparing learning achievement to reference group or performance criteria • Determine effectiveness of instructional activities • Course grades • Learner placement • Accountability for learning • Diagnostics about strengths and weakness in students’ performance • Data on achievement of departments or school performance

12. Creating Effective Summative Assessments • Must target and tie back to instructional objectives • Most accurate when they aggregate information from a number of sources • Relative weighting of various sources • Comprehensive measure of overall knowledge, skill, or performance related to a unit of instruction

13. Good Assessments • Validity • Reliability • Authenticity

14. Formative Assessment • Before or during instruction • Plan or make adjustments in instruction • Identify students who are struggling

15. Evaluation • Criterion-referenced – based on absolute criterion (achieve 80% or higher, etc.) • Norm-referenced – based on comparison of others’ performance (standardized tests)

16. Recap • Effective teachers need more than just knowledge; they need good communication, interpersonal and listening skills • Assessment and Evaluation measure how well a student is doing and the effectiveness of a set of instructional activities