My experiences over the years with interviews,
colleagues, students, parents, or just meeting new people in general has really
taught me a lot about communication skills.
From these experiences, two very important factors regarding
communication skills which will be necessary for leading a policy change are
nonverbal and listening. According to
the Effective Communication article,
effective communication helps us to understand another person’s situation and
build trust and respect for that person (http://www.helpguide.org/mental/effective_communication_skills.htm). Nonverbal
communication involves using body language that enables the person you’re
communicating with to feel comfortable, engaged, and free to express their
emotions. Characteristics of nonverbal
language are uncrossed arms, steady eye contact, pleasant smile, vocal tone,
muscle tension and breathing, patting someone on the back, etc. (http://www.helpguide.org/mental/effective_communication_skills.htm). All of these gestures
signal to a person that the other person is interested in helping their
situation the best way possible. Listening is also a very important
effective communication skill. As an educator,
when I teach a new skill and conduct a brief class discussion afterwards, when
students respond correctly to questions from just listening, that lets me know
I have effectively communicated the basic background knowledge information
pertaining to the skill; when a person can clearly paraphrase or repeat verbatim
what someone said, positive vibes are automatically created because they feel
important and like someone has actually taken their situation seriously. These are the types of emotions that effective
communication should produce.
After taking the personal communications test, my
results indicated that I have a little anxiety about certain communication
skills but not all of them; therefore, I’m going to work on improving the
skills that I am comfortable with and work on improving the ones that I shy
away from. Launching a new policy issue
is going to require nonverbal and verbal effective communication skills due to
the fact that several audiences must be reached. These audiences include, parent, educators,
family members, students, school administrators, community leaders, state and
federal officials, etc. All of these
people play an important role in increasing parent and family agencies in early
childhood education. Their support will be
critical when implementing new educational programs, parent and student
academic training sessions and when dealing with funding program
opportunities.
Reference:
Helpguide.org. (n.d.). Effective communication. Retrieved
October 15, 2013, fromhttp://www.helpguide.org/mental/effective_communication_skills.htm
Jessica L. Beal
