Playing the Telephone Game
What’s the best way to get information to the needed parties: parents, students, teachers, etc? Definitely not through meetings… that’s what I learned through 3 years of pointless communication.
We (humans) are horrible about paying attention when other people are talking. Either we get distracted, like squirrels and shiny objects or are thinking about what we are going to say next. This gets even worse when we try to disseminate information through paper contact or emails. Either people get a bunch of pointless information or we never receive the good stuff at all.
I have been on the receiving and giving end of this problem. As a teacher, I had a write many an email to parents and other teachers. I try to write in a bullet style… get the info as quickly and as efficiently as possible. However, I have learned people don’t like that style, too impersonal. It’s even worse when I had to call parents and discuss their students. Usually those phone calls were becase the student failed to do something. So I would get on the phone and make some stupid small talk and then… “Well, the reason I called was…” and they stop listening.
As a parent, the information I need never gets home correctly. I have to resort to questioning my 7 year olds, which does not go well. I know what I hear is not what the kids heard in the first place. It’s like the telephone game kids played in the 1950s. Teachers should know that anything that my kids hear goes in one ear and straight out the other. (This also is true of teenagers, college students, and adults). Likewise, any paper note disappears in their backpacks, just like the there’s a black hole in the bottom. Things go in but never come back out.
So how do we streamline our communication in education? My dream is that everyone could be like me… straight and to the point, bullet point emails. If we want to make small talk we can, but only if we want to, not because we need to get information across. Actually let’s take this approach for all of life. Bullet points, unless we want to make small talk, then fine, we make small talk.
Otherwise any communication coming across is like playing the telephone game… “You need to send $2.00 in next week for the field trip.” becomes “Our hamster is having babies.”
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