Communication and Teaching

By far I do not consider myself to be an excellent communicator, especially when it comes to teaching. I've been wanting to improve my teaching skills, and really the best way to do that is through practice. I've had a few previous teaching experiences with nutrition and elementary aged kids. I've also dealt with communication when it came to helping kids at the YMCA with their homework, or even just discussing life skills. But it wasn't really until this year that I experienced a communication barrier that really made me feel inadequate when it comes to teaching. I first experienced this last semester when I was taking a personal training course and had the opportunity to train some volunteers. Being shy has always made it hard for me to open up to people that I do not know very well. However, my shyness in this circumstance undermined my apparent confidence which broke down the communication between me and my trainee. Since they did not see me as being confident in my abilities it made it hard for them to trust me and feel confident in what they were doing. This is definitely significant when personal training resides on trust and confidence. I knew that this "practice" was not really what it will be like in a real situation of having a client because, normally I would get to know the client first before training them (which I did not get to do in this class). Getting to know them first will make it easier to establish a bond and trust to have better communication. Despite this, it still made me realize that it is something that I need to work on, since I will not always have the opportunity to get to know someone beforehand. And if not corrected, it is something that will carry over into my other experiences of teaching.
As such, it did carry over into this semester with another class in which I teach nutrition/cooking for the Inter-faith Food Shuttle. In the beginning of the class, my other team members noticed that I seemed shy and unconfident when teaching the nutrition lessons to the families. I felt like this also had a negative impact on the participants because my communication was not as engaging as it could have been for them to have an optimal learning experience. When I come across as shy and unconfident, the other people are more likely to feel uncomfortable and more likely to become uninterested. As with the personal training, the behavior would also make it harder for the participants to trust what I am teaching them, if I do not seem confident in myself. Thankfully after teaching several of the classes I started to feel more comfortable as I got to know the families, which to my group members they said that I looked more confident.

I think this difficulty has a lot to do with perception and self-concept. Even though I didn't feel unconfident in my abilities, my shyness and subsequent actions caused people around me to perceive that I was not confident. This is probably because the people that I taught and my group members selected information based on my behavior and actions, how I presented myself. They then organized them into constructs such as an interaction construct which would identify me as being shy; my psychological construct might have come across as being nervous and worried because of my body language. My role construct would be categorized as a teacher or instructor. They would then base their interpretation off of these constructs, determining that I was a teacher that seemed uncomfortable, nervous, and quiet. Together someone would probably interpret these things as a person being unconfident, as many of them expressed. However, they might not know that my actions were because it is hard for me to be open with people that I do not know very well, despite whether I feel confident in my abilities or not. However, what matters more is how my actions make people perceive. Being more outgoing and making people feel comfortable when they first meet me would be beneficial and is something that I want to improve on.
The interesting thing is how something like other's perception can influence a person's self-concept. Though I felt confident in my abilities and in myself, when I realized that other's thought that I was lacking confidence, it started to make me feel less confident because partly I knew that's what they were seeing and partly because I felt like I was inadequate in my ability to teach. However, self-concept changes. Just as their perception partly influenced my self-concept, I desired to change that and improve my abilities and people's perception of me. It will take time to not come across as being shy, because it is something that I've delt with my whole life. But I hope the more that I interact in this type of situation, the more I will feel comfortable, and the less people will think I lack confidence. I'm about to start a new class with new people, so we'll see how it goes.

There is one more concept the book talks about that I wanted to discuss in regards to my teaching. In regards to language, in the 5th chapter, the book talks about speaking at an appropriate level. This was definitely challenging in my nutrition/cooking class because I was teaching pairs of parents and their children that were around preschool age. I had to change my language on two levels. First, I am very use to having to use certain terms in college in reference to nutrition. However, when teaching basic nutrition we are asked to make it easy to understand, and sometimes I forget this when I'm use to talking a certain way to my peers and professors at school. Sometimes during the teaching class I would catch myself saying something that I assumed they would knew, and would then try and rephrase my words to help them understand. And in no way am I saying they were not smart, but that people have to learn the basics first before progressing, just like when we have introductory courses and progress to more advanced courses. I definitely admire professors who are able to teach well at both levels, because I had never really thought how it would be to "think back to the basics" after being used to talking a certain way. As I mentioned earlier, I had to change my language on two levels. As you might have guessed I also had to change my language so that the preschoolers could understand. This was definitely challenging trying to speak both to the parents and to the preschoolers, in a way that they would both understand and yet the parents wouldn't feel like I was just talking to the kids. I had never been in this situation before, and it was definitely more challenging trying to put nutrition on a level for preschoolers to understand. On top of that, a lot of the material in the class is geared towards the adults. Many times we wound up separating the adults and the kids into separate groups so that the kids could do a fun activity that was more on their level, and that would keep them engaged. This definitely helped with the language barrier some. When the kids and parents were grouped together, I would usually have to switch my questions, either being directed at the kids, or being directed at the parents. At some points I was afraid the parents would feel like we were "talking down to them" because we wanted the kids to understand, but I think the fact that the kids were there helped them to know that we were talking that way because of the kids and not them. However, I could definitely tell the parents liked when we separated them from the kids. Several parents expressed to me that they liked being able to have deeper conversations because they felt like they got more out of it. Having to talk to the kids at the same time partly inhibited the learning experience for the adults. I'm glad that I've had this experience though, since I hadn't really been exposed to it before. I'm hoping that our next upcoming class will flow a little bit smoother since I will be able to teach them based on what I've learned from the previous class.