Teaching Communication

One of the things I enjoy doing the most is teach. Whether I am at any good at that I will leave to others to address. But I find the act of preparing lesson plans, figuring out ways to be informative and motivational, and interacting with a range of students to be fun, challenging and stimulating. I have been doing it now for over twenty years. Specifically, I teach a public relations class part-time and have been doing so at different colleges, the one most recent for the past five years. I view what I do in this regard as important because successful communication is vital to the success of our society and our world. Any thing that any one can do to help drive that fundamental truism home to students of communication should be supported.

In my teaching experiences, one lesson above all others that I strive to impart on students is that becoming an effective communicator requires constant and ongoing practice. It is very much like becoming a high caliber artist. Yo-Yo Ma is a great and acclaimed musician, but you can bet he continues to practice as often as he can. Why? Because he wants to retain his level of performance and, if possible, improve upon it. Yo-Yo Ma, of course, is one of countless examples of this.

Many students, at least initially, view communication as being easy because, let's face it, everybody does it and everybody does it all the time. One joke is we can even communicate without even thinking because it is so fundamental to our being. Sadly, far too many people do attempt to communicate without much planning or thought. Consequently, it is not surprising to know that most attempts by so-called professionals fail or are not as effective as they could be simply because not nearly as much planning has been done before hand.

Whether you are in public relations or another profession; whether you are simply trying to make social arrangements with friends; or whether you are trying to share your own views about something, the fundamentals of communication remain: be a good listener, know your audience, and know what it is you are trying to communicate and what you trying to achieve. They are worth learning and remembering. I will continue highlighting these essentials to future students and, of course, keep practicing them myself.