While we all know that communication entails the effective transfer of information, we would like to highlight the vital role it plays in developing relationships conducive to student success. In particular, we find that communication strongly impacts the relationship between you and your students, between students themselves, and between students and the subject matter and work of the course. In light of this, we offer the following considerations as a way of augmenting how you think about and practice communication in the classroom and thereby enrich your pedagogical toolkit.
Purpose
A sense of purpose is integral to engaged work. Students, even those self-selecting into our courses, often don’t understand the aims, benefits, and rewards of our disciplines. Therefore, sharing with students the scholarly, pedagogical, philosophical, ethical, political, and/or personal reasons for why we do what we do is a powerful inducement for them to identify with the values and goals of the academic community. Our purposes and how we articulate them will look different from teacher to teacher. What they will share in common, however, is their offering students deeper, more compelling reasons for practicing academic habits of mind and dispositions than simply skills acquisition. Communicating to students a sense of why their being there matters beyond satisfying an administrative goal is key to developing an intrinsic level of engagement.
Questions
The types of questions you ask in class play a large role in the kinds of questioners you allow your students to be, and thus in the quality of inquiry you engage in together. Fact-finding questions have their place, as do questions that require explicit reliance upon course readings. At the same time, questions that get at the broader import of your inquiry elevate class discussion to a problem-posing/problem-solving workshop in which the issues become meaningful in themselves, not just as learning outcomes. Keep in mind that a student’s ability to ask subtle, insightful, provocative questions correlates with their knowledge and experience of the subject. At the beginning, the most critical questions to be asked are: what is it, what is it good for. Recognizing such questions not as lacking critical acumen, but as foundational questions inviting further inquiry, can lead to engrossing, generative discussions that raise core issues in unexpected and far-reaching ways.
Seating
Students seated in rows with you at center stage is a powerful inducement to class discussions feeling like an examination or game show, with you in the role of inquisitor or host. This can foster a dependent relationship with you as the driver of discussion; a competitive relationship between students vying for your approval; and a passive relationship with knowledge itself: rather than thinking and discussing together as a group, students’ ideas are offered up one by one to you for validation. When you seat students in a way that allows them to see each other and decenters you – circles are great for this; small clusters of desks also work well – you will notice that students begin to respond to each other more often, as well as to approach discussions less in terms of trying to answer questions, and more in the spirit of trying to wrestle with issues and ideas.
Practice
When students speak in class, they are not simply conveying information; they are digesting ideas and practicing discursive strategies. Student don’t learn what reaction formation or entropy or stagflation are by reading and repeating a dictionary definition, but by trial and error applying these terms to different phenomena, situations, and experiences, the process of which refines and expands their usage while delimiting their range of applicability. Practically speaking, this means that giving students time to talk in small groups, to write in journals, to connect over blogs, discussion boards, email, etc. is not simply a matter of creating community and camaraderie – though it is, importantly, that – but it is also providing them with the material resources of time and space necessary to practice.
These are just a few of the ways in which you can use communication to develop successful relationships in your classroom. We encourage you to consider them when designing and teaching your courses, and we would love to hear feedback on your efforts, as well as other strategies you have found useful.