Considering Institutional Context
Guiding Question: How do oral communication assignments fit with the institutional mission, the department objectives, and your disciplinary culture?
Before you think through your work within your specific courses, it is important for you to consider the contextual issues that might surround your particular course and discipline. How you integrate oral communication activities and assignments into your course occurs within the context of your institution’s goals as well as your discipline’s expectations. Consider the institutional mission, and the ways in which that mission fits with the local region and community. What historical issues influence this mission? How do these relate to the role of your discipline within the larger institution? What other initiatives (such as writing across the curriculum) are present and how are they implemented on your campus? How does your particular department contribute to larger initiatives, a broader sense of your discipline, and/or institution? If you are in a department that is one of many within your larger discipline, what historical or current departmental issues are relevant to your department’s activities? How does the class fit within the larger curriculum? What is the communicative culture of your discipline, department, and curriculum?
There are also considerations related to logistical issues: What are the realities you face in terms of elements such as time, space and students’ demographic? What are your students likely to face relative to expectations in other courses that they are taking—for example, if all major courses require extensive group work, will students be able to fully participate if they are expected to be fully functioning group members in four different long-term group projects?
Finally, there are considerations about the impact of using new kinds of pedagogy in your own teaching and upon how your teaching is evaluated. To what extent have you had some experience working in other communication-related initiatives? How prepared do you feel for turning over some control in the classroom to student discussion? How ready do you feel to assess oral communication efforts of students? What kind of institutional support is available to you to help you develop your pedagogical approaches? What kinds of criteria are used to evaluate you as a teacher, and do they take into consideration investment in new pedagogies?
Once you have a better understanding of these institutional considerations, it is important to consider the cultural, disciplinary issues that will impact the teaching and learning of communication. Some of those could emerge from particular historical traditions in your discipline, others might emerge from standards of practice that have become entrenched in the way in which the faculty and students in your discipline go about approaching communication. Yet others possibly emerge from the pragmatics of your students, faculty, and institutional structure. These situated, disciplinary issues are important to understand because the teaching and learning of communication within your courses will be driven, in many ways, by the context in which it is occurring. Chapter 3 addresses this decision point in more detail.
Decision Point II: Articulating Objectives and Outcomes
Guiding Question: What are your instructional objectives for incorporating oral communication in the classroom and what communication outcomes do you want your students to achieve?
As you think about incorporating oral communication in your course, consider the reasons it might be beneficial for your classes. What purpose could oral communication serve in the larger context of the course? The answer to this question will help you in defining broad instructional objectives for incorporating oral communication in your classroom. For some, you might want to use oral communication in a supporting role—to push students to engage in the reading more thoroughly or to help students talk through their opinions and ideas about course content. For others, you might want to help students master certain professional communication skills they can later use in the workplace. Yet, others might be most concerned about using communication to encourage students to participate as active citizens of their local and national communities. Instructional objectives are typically written in the goal-statement form, beginning with “My goals for using communication in this course include . . . ” or “The purpose of this communication activity or assignment is . . .” Sample instructional objectives are:
•to become familiar with critical thinking approaches necessary for understanding course content, issues, or problems
•to increase group cohesiveness
•to increase student responsibility for learning in the class
•to become proficient at asking questions in the context of your discipline
•to develop facilitation and discussion skills
•to increase awareness and skills for dealing with group conflict
•to be able to use vocabulary needed for professional contexts outside of the classroom
•to learn how to do close reading of texts
•to gain insight into a particular author’s work
•to develop the ability to address a hostile audience.
Instructional objectives or goals are not exactly the same as specific communication outcomes, although they are clearly related. Not all of our objectives or goals as teachers are measurable, yet it is important to articulate that we have them. We may, for example, have an objective that students will become more ethically sensitive, or have empathy for alternative points of view. It would be difficult to measure these kinds of objectives, yet they still provide direction. Student-learning outcomes, on the other hand, are measurable, and as such they can be evaluated should we choose to do so. Therefore, beyond your broad-scale instructional objectives or goals, it is important to identify the specific communication outcomes you want your students to achieve by taking your course. It is possible your institution will refer to these outcomes as “learning objectives” as there are varied definitions for objectives and outcomes dependent on the context. For this context, though, outcomes identify the desired capabilities you want students to have when they leave the course, as opposed to goals that are broad statements of purpose, and at times what we simply hope will happen for students.
One often-used framework for articulating objectives and outcomes is Bloom’s taxonomy. While there have been revisions to this taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2000), and there has been some controversy about its use, we believe it is useful to consider the three major classifications of student learning outlined by Bloom and colleagues (1956): cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. The cognitive domain deals with what you want students to know—the “recall or recognition of knowledge and the development of intellectual abilities and skills” (Bloom, 1956, p. 7). The affective domain deals with values, attitudes, and interest. Finally, the behavioral domain (or psychomotor learning, the term used by Bloom) is focused on motor skills, and commonly is related to speech, handwriting, and technical proficiencies (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1964).
When you are writing course-based outcomes and when you are designing assignments, it might be helpful for you to think about which domains you want to focus on. In Chapter 4, for example, when we discuss outcomes for informal activities, you will often be focused on the cognitive domain and affective domain (what you want students to know and value after engaging in communication), whereas when you design more formal assignments (Chapter 5) that typically have a grade or greater credit value attached to them, you are often adding a psychomotor domain (what you want students to be able to do, communicatively, as demonstrated in the assignment).
There are a number of different formulas for writing student-learning outcomes. For example, the A.B.C.D. framework refers to writing outcomes that identify: the audience/target of the outcome, the expected behavior, the conditions under which this behavior will be expected, and the degree/standard by which acceptable performance will be judged (Heinich,
