The Art of Effective Communication

After reading the email from Jane, my initial thought was the message was a bit passive aggressive to state how my work is holding up her work with no consideration of my timeline of availability.


Listening to the phone call, the message was softened by the inflection of her voice, though, I still felt as though I was being pressed to complete my work.


The face to face conversation allowed me to understand her need for me to complete my job as she did not express any passive aggressive tone, nor show facial expression or stance in pressing me to get my part done beyond her simple request.


A few factors to consider with the three modalities of communications was how I was feeling when I received them. I had a long busy day and was very tired when I sat down to complete the exercise. This set my inner dialogue tone to be on the offense when I first read the email. The phone call did not help much more but did soften the message for interpretation. Face to face conversation made the biggest impact of understanding as I was able to pick up other cues to the real message of her just needing my help.

This activity allowed me the experience of seeing how impactful a face to face conversation can truly be on a project. Stok (2020) stated in an article of how “communication in person is crucial for clarity and full understanding.” This is very evident as it allows for the tone, body language and other nonverbal cues to communicate the message. According to Rampton (2020), email may not be as persuasive as talking to someone face to face as it lacks the personal connection one experiences. When we are face to face with someone, we tend to fall into a more polite tone with other cues to show our concerns and needs. An email is not personal connections or other cues to see the real implications beyond how the reader is feeling at the moment.



References:

Stok, G. (2020). Face-to-Face Conversation Is Important for Success. Retrieved 28 September 2020, from https://toughnickel.com/business/How-to-Have-a-Meaningful-Face-to-Face-Conversation


Rampton, J. (2020). Email Is Great But Face-to-Face Meetings Are 34 Times More Successful. Retrieved 28 September 2020, from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/296590

Post Mortem OTIS Project

 

I was brought onboard as part of the Orange Technical Instructional Support (OTIS) team several years ago. The team was created to teach us to be technology trainers. We met once a week for the entire summer learning various computer programs and how they could be used in a school setting. Our teams were to then create technology curriculum and lesson plans for the school district to share amongst the instructional staff. The idea of this project sounded like a good plan, but several things held it back from developing and eventually failed. 

A few of the most frustrating parts of our project developed with the lack of technology on every school campus.  At the time, we only had a few computer labs on each campus and many of them were none fully functional.  The software we were using in the trainings was not able to run on the school computers.  A great deal of staff members were not comfortable using technology to teach.  Many on the OTIS team were great with using technology but forgot that the steps in a curriculum or lesson needed to be broken down into the smallest steps for the teachers to digest and learn so they can teach it to students. 

The team worked well together and was able to outline the technology curriculum and plan many of the lessons. This was very successful in beginning the database of tech lessons for instructional staff.  The formation and idea behind this group led the district to realize the real depth of the technology jump we needed to make rather then this tiny step.  The success that followed this project was learning from our failure as the school district leaders took our evaluations and thoughts and turned it into the one to one device initiative for every teacher and student to receive a digital device.  

The OTIS teams were changed into the Digital Curriculum Lead Teams that comprised of five to six staff members from every school.  Each team worked together to continue building on the database of curriculum and lessons and was trained on how to teach staff how to use a laptop to teach their students.  District purchased laptops for every staff member and student, rolling out at the high school level and then every year roll out to lower grade levels.  Breaking it down into more manageable parts. This made a bigger impact on the technological advances the stakeholders wanted to see rather than the dead ends that the OTIS project had hit.