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from The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner

The Fifth Survival Skill: Effective Oral and Written Communication

Communication skills are a major factor highlighted in dozens of studies over the years that focus on students’ lack of preparation for both college and the workplace, and these skills are only going to become more important as teams are increasingly composed of individuals from diverse cultures. The ability to express one’s views clearly in a democracy and to communicate effectively across cultures is an important citizenship skill as well. …

When I asked Rob Gordon [former director of the American Politics Program at West Point] what advice he had for teachers today, he was emphatic: “Teach them to write! Effective communication is key in everything we do – people need to learn to communicate effectively with each other and with external communities. Even enlisted men need to communicate effectively via e-mail. … I saw the importance of this in Iraq when I went back in January of 2004. When we asked a brigade commander what he’d learned, he talked about the importance of relying on soldiers who understood not only what they were seeing on screens that showed near real-time combatant movements but also how to interpret and communicate what they saw.”

Mike Summers [vice president for Global Talent Management at Dell Computers] also spoke forcefully on this issue: “We are routinely surprised at the difficulty some young people have in communicating: verbal skills, written skills, presentation skills. They have difficulty being clear and concise; it’s hard for them to create focus, energy, and passion around the points they want to make.” …

Listening to Summers’s comments as a former English teacher myself, I was surprised by the list of skills he thought important: not only the ability to communicate one’s thoughts clearly and concisely but also the ability to create focus, energy and passion. Summers and other leaders from various companies were not necessarily complaining about young people’s poor grammar, punctuation or spelling – the things we spend so much time teaching and testing in our schools. While it’s obviously important to write and speak correctly, the complaines I heard most frequently were about fuzzy thinking and the lack of writing with a real voice.

This is important information for teachers and librarians. What is disheartening, though, is that standardized tests don’t typically test this kind of writing and teachers have very little time to teach it. Any ideas for giving students opportunities to practice this kind of communication?

Image citation: IMG_5505-2 by Phototrope.

Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed pointed me to a very interesting and thought-provoking article today. Entitled Is Google Making Us Stoopid?, the author explores the increasing tendency to skim, scan and browse information rather than doing “deep reading” on a topic. In fact, he presents the idea that perhaps our brains are actually changing and becoming less able to handle this type of thinking.

I’m not so sure.

Where does the purpose for reading come into play? If skimming and scanning information on the web gets me the information that I need, then I’m going to skim and scan. If, however, I have a need to understand something in a deeper way, I’m going to make the effort to find some good quality resources and read them carefully in order to understand the topic and make an informed decision.

Before the days of the Internet, the encyclopedia was the enemy of teachers who wanted students to do deep reading and thinking in a research paper. Students would skim and scan an encyclopedia article and copy enough information to complete the assignment. Today they use the Internet to do the same thing. If, however, we change the assignment/research question so that it is requires original thought, skimming and scanning won’t do.

Maybe deep reading, thinking and writing will occur naturally when that’s what is required – in school and in life.

Take some time to read the article, then share your thoughts in the comments.

Image source: A Twisted Family Tradition – the Lime Jello Brain. Uploaded on February 6, 2005 by hurleygurley. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license