Mrs A's Blog

I haven’t updated my blog for a while.  The main reason – I’ve been extremely busy.  My teaching partner (HOD) has been on long service leave for the last term which has left me “in charge” of the department.  As a result I was managing more than myself.  I realised that we have gotten into the groove of how we work together over the last five years.  I can explain how I think the lesson/idea/project works and my teaching partner could successfully translate and vice versa.  And our teacher aide had become very adept at translating the way my teaching partner thought as well.

This term working with a new teaching partner, a new teacher aide and having more contact with our long term teacher aide has made me realise how good we get in teaching at understanding the ways the people we work with everyday think.  I have always prided myself on my communication skills.  I thought that I had good communication skills.  It turns out they are not as good as I thought!  When working with these new staff I realised how long it actually takes to learn to communicate with your colleagues especially those you work with on a daily basis and by the last week of the term I think we had started to think along the same lines when working together.  Understanding the inner workings of how colleagues think really does take a long time to develop.

I have learnt this term that there is more than talking and listening to this whole communication thing!  When trying to convey information through the exchange of ideas it can at times involve so many other components.  I have learnt that I think in pictures and movies and sometimes trying to translate these pictures and movies doesn’t always work.  When trying to explain to a colleague what exactly it is you are trying to achieve/create doesn’t always come across.  Even drawing funny little pictures doesn’t always work if the pictures are not understood.  I can understand how easy it is to get frustrated.  Usually the problem was not that the person you are working with hasn’t understood  the problem was how you explained it in the first place.

I have decided that communication is more about how the message is decoded rather than how the message is actually conveyed. And I need to work on making sure that the message I am conveying is clear and easy to decode.