A number of members of the Communication and English teaching team have accumulated many years experience servicing various vocational areas and understand the importance of specialist teaching. Fiona is no exception and in this post outlines the value of communication skills for learners.
One of the main things Fiona does is to ensure students gain an understanding of the importance of English and communication skills and the part it plays not only in a college setting but also in their wider employment possibilities. She makes it clear form the get go that their communication class is not a stand alone unit; what skills knowledge and understanding they learn in the Communication class are useful and easily transferred too within all other units on their Programme of study.
In general terms, most of the Communication Units we teach are broken down into three distinct learning areas, namely Reading, Writing and Speaking. Fiona has broken down the three outcomes below to provide some context.
It has always been a strength of the teaching team to ensure that contextualisation of materials is at the forefront of the learner's journey, whilst being careful not to over assess.
Reading - in Communication units at all levels, learners analyse and evaluate a piece of text; these skills can, and indeed should, be used in all their other class when reading course handouts and text books. That is to say, the learning has value and is not therefore a stand alone skill. All of our students should be able to say, without fear, that the skills learned in our classes are transferable.
Writing - in this outcome, aspects such as layouts, referencing, front covers, using spell checks especially looking at grammar and syntax are taught. These skills should be applied to any written work for their other lecturers. Again, the sense of transferability is at the forefront of our meaningful teaching and assessment philosophy.
Speaking - in this outcome, learners will present an individual oral presentation using PowerPoint or similar visual anchor, participate in a discussion, or contribute to a formal meeting where decisions are encouraged. Often this is the skill where learners have concerns about their ability, but in more cases than not, a well structured talk can produce excellent results. This helps with oral deliveries in their other units as well as in job interviews, which often includes a presentation nowadays.
All of the aforementioned should make perfect and logical sense to the students, and provide other staff members with a higher quality of responses in written format, and hopefully allow the parent staff members to concentrate on their specific content (subject) and not have to point out spelling and referencing errors and how written work should be set out. This sounds somewhat theoretical, but it most definitely does happen in practice!
For this cyclical teaching ideology to work, members of the English and Communication team must engage with the staff from the parent section. Fiona does this continually and has formed very close working relationships and have explained in detail what she can do to help them, and their students, with course work/assessments.
As way of working example - vocational teams often ask the students to write a report, Fiona then gets a copy of the report brief from them, and work with the students to produce a good quality report - well set out and in a clear easily readable format, that is well researched and correctly referenced. This then allows the parent section staff members to direct their teaching to their subject matter and not have to worry about spelling grammar and explaining formatting issues.
This ultimately reduces stress for students and staff, as the student now has two lecturers 'singing from the same hymn sheet' as it were and not giving conflicting or confusing information. This also helps reduce the burden of assessment for students as the one piece of work can in most cases cover two separate assessments, thus diminishing assessment overload for our learners.
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