Guiding Question: What assignment or activities can you design to achieve your oral communication goals and outcomes?
As you might have noticed, the process of identifying measurable student-learning outcomes leads you to consider the assignments within which those outcomes can be realized. The third decision point focuses on designing assignments and activities to achieve your objectives and outcomes. When thinking about the nature of the assignments, you will need to make decisions about the stakes, structure, and format of each assignment. Specifically, some of these assignments will be very formal, high-stakes events. Others might be very informal activities with little, if any, credit attached. You might structure some of these assignments as collaborative (e.g., team-based), or you might structure them in combination with other assignments (e.g., writing). Additionally, you will need to decide what type of oral communication activity you will have your students engage in during and outside of class. Some might look like traditional public presentations, and others might be more focused on teamwork or small-group communication competencies. The structure and nature of the communication assignment or activity should directly flow from your communication objectives and expected outcomes. If one of your objectives is to help students understand their readings more critically, then you can consider a wide variety of oral communication activities or assignments that could achieve that objective. Your decision, though, should be to go with whichever option is best aligned with the outcome you expect students to demonstrate. It might not make sense, for example, to have students give a formal thirty-minute presentation to achieve the objective of understanding readings more critically. A more aligned activity might be to have students rotate, with each student providing a two-minute critical review presentation in which they articulate the argument of the reading and one criticism of it to start the day’s discussion. An alternative might be for each student to pose two questions for clarification and one or two questions for evaluation in a two-minute informal presentation to the class. The point is, you get to decide how to construct oral communication activities and assignments, but those decisions should align with your goals.
Some of the questions you will need to consider in this decision point include
•What type of communication assignments or activities will best meet your objectives? (e.g., presentation, small group or team-based, one-on-one, etc.)?
•Where on the spectrum between formal (high stakes) and informal (low stakes) will the assignments or activities fall?
•What particular constraints do you want to place on the assignment or activity in order to focus students on your communication goals?
•What guidelines do you want to give students about the assignment or activity in order to focus them on your communication objectives?
•Are there ways to scaffold assignments and activities so that they work together to meet overall course goals (see Chapter 5 for a discussion on scaffolding)?
These questions will get you started. Chapters 4 and 5 of this book provide information on designing both formal communication assignments (often used to foster professional communication competencies) as well as informal communication activities. These chapters also provide information about how to scaffold these activities and assignment to best meet your desired goals.
Decision Point IV: Supporting Student Learning
Guiding Question: How can you support the distinct oral communication challenges your students might face when engaging in oral communication activities and assignments?
Like any new skill or process, oral communication does not come naturally. Although some would argue that talking is a skill that many have naturally, and therefore need no help with, we suggest that when using oral communication to achieve particular goals, there are issues that need to be addressed in terms of student support. Regardless of your assignment decisions, oral communication opens the door for a number of challenges students (and you) could face. Specifically, when asking students to participate in oral communication assignments, there is a possibility that you will need to deal with issues of apprehension, participation, difficult interactions (conflict), and diversity. This fourth decision point is about figuring out how to deal with these issues and provide students with the support they need to work through the potential challenges and be successful. As faculty, your primary job is to teach content, and we realize you probably do not have the time to fully explore these challenges. Yet, there is a wealth of information about these challenges that you could use to preempt them or diffuse them when they arise. We suggest that you seriously consider attending to these challenges because it is these that usually become critical factors in whether or not you accomplish your objectives.
Some of the questions you will need to consider within this decision point include
•To what extent do your assignments and activities open the door for communication apprehension? What fears might students have about engaging in these assignments and activities?
•What challenges do students face when participating in class activities or group discussions? Are students likely to be quiet, and even resistant to speaking up in class? Or are students eager to participate in communication activities such as discussions?
•What are student experiences with group communication activities? For example, how will you manage students who have had bad experiences with group or teamwork and who are discouraged at the prospect of being involved in yet another group project?
•What conflicts or difficult interactions do you anticipate could emerge when students work on and perform their communication activities and assignments?
•What issues of diversity (e.g., gender, ethnic, cultural) might cause challenges to students as they work on and perform their communication activities and assignments?
Section III of this book (Chapters 6 through 10) discusses each of these challenges and provides suggestions of activities and assignments to help support students who face these challenges.
Decision Point V: Evaluating Learning
Guiding Question: What assessment structures will provide the most useful information to you and your students in terms of their relative abilities to achieve your learning outcomes?
Nine times out of ten, the first question faculty members have when thinking about using oral communication in their course revolves around assessment. We recognize that assessment takes time, and assessment of oral communication might feel daunting, given your expertise is on the content of your course. Yet, assessment is tied directly to your goals, assignment design, and student support. This final decision point asks you to consider various assessment mechanisms that could help you understand the ways in which students are fulfilling your goals and the ways in which they need to improve. Additionally, we believe it is important—specifically when assessing oral communication—to consider the relational nature of assessment, and to pay attention to the ways in which you can respond to students in order to increase the potential for learning. Students often feel that when they speak, whether in front of a large group or in a small team-based setting, whether formal or informal, that they are putting themselves out there. Therefore, there is the potential that students will become defensive when given feedback. For this reason, we address issues related to this personal and embodied nature of oral communication feedback and response.
Some of the questions you will need to answer within this decision point include
•What mechanisms will you use to assess students’ oral communication assignments and activities? How formal or informal will the assessments be?
•How will you provide feedback to students?
•What face issues (i.e., ego management) could emerge when providing feedback to students on their communication performances and how can you mitigate those issues?
•What various response