Blog 6 - Communication

Perception and Communication

Describe a situation from your own experience where your initial perception of someone was incorrect. What led you to make that initial judgement and what did you discover later which indicated that this perception was incorrect? What would you do differently to avoid making this judgement again?

In the first two years of secondary school I personally took a disliking towards a boy named Alex. When we initially meet I found it difficult to get along with him for various reasons. My initial impression of him was that he was ‘sly’, and that he was not the kind of person I would normally associate myself with as I found him untrustworthy and un-loyal. The main turning point in me making my judgment around him was based on an incident involving myself Alex and another boy. Without going into detail an incident happened whereby I felt aggrieved by both of the boys so I chose not to associate myself with them. This was a bad judgement call as I later found out that Alex had taken no part in the incident that had previously offended me and that in fact he had defended me. I also found out that he is a very shy person, which is why he finds it hard to speak up against more dominant personalities. Upon finding out all of this information fate put us together on a school trip ware by I had to room with him, since that holiday we have been close friends and even though we attend different university’s remain close and still see each other on a regular basis and go away on holidays together with other mates in our summer holidays. My initial judgements we similar to how Robbins defined our perceptions of people. Robbins stated “Perception was the process by which individuals organise and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment” (Robbins, 2010). To avoid making misjudgements like this in the future I will make sure that I am as fully informed as I can be when assessing a person’s character before making any final judgments about them. I will have to properly perceive the situation at hand and not jump to any conclusions if possible to allow a fairer representation of the situation under judgment.

Read the article below on “How to Improve Staff Communication. Using the recommendations from the article, identify 3 ways in which the university can improve communication with the students.

Reading through the article about Unilever was very useful in deciding three ways in which Buck’s University could also improve it communication skills, with regards of dealing with students.

Firstly Bucks new University could set a similar challenge to Unilever’s ware by lectures are given the challenge of performing a presentation to a group of school children, and then let the children rate the lectures performance and their overall understanding of what was taught to them. This would enable lectures to prove that any one new to the subject will be able to understand what is taught to them despite having a smaller background knowledge. It will also test at it did in the Unilever case wither or not university staff are able to explain them self’s clearly, concisely and most importantly in a simple manor that students will be able to understand and apply when asked to. By asking lectures to break down there thought process in to bite sized chunk’s the university is making sure that anyone can learn in their education establishment. Although upon attending university you are normally required to have previously achieved a base academic level allowing your entry to carry on studying, this method would help new students to break into the course and its subject matter far easier. Instead of worrying that student are not able to understand what is being taught to them, the university would be safe in the knowledge that all communications between lectures and student is clear and concise avoiding situations of little understanding. This communication development would help everyone in the respect that students will feel more comfortable and learn more increasing their happiness and intern hopefully improving their grade averages. This help the university as is gain higher status and ranking.

Another way in which Buck’s university can learn from Unilever’s experiment would be to follow in Unilever’s footsteps with regards to PowerPoint presentations. Getting rid of them completely as Unilever did would not work, as they are so commonly associated with teaching. To note there isn’t one student or lecturer that hasn’t come across Microsoft’s PowerPoint within the classroom setting. To stop using it would be very short sited and would most probably cause more harm than good. On the other hand if teachers were encouraged to use PowerPoint less this would increase communication skills no end, and would hopefully put an end to the student saying “Death by PowerPoint” after attending lectures that are completely dependent on the program. PowerPoint lower’s communications between students, as they are asked to focus on one board for hours on end. It also stops the need for any discussion between class members as the lessons are pre written and structured. But by lessening the use of PowerPoint the university creates more flexible lessons ware group discussions can be encouraged and the teacher has more of a chance to interact with the students on a human more personal level.

The final thing the university should do to improve communications between students and itself is totally stop the practice of unimportant blanket email. Not only are these emails annoying and unconstructive, they give the impression that the university does not care enough about the student to recognise that they are an individual part of a larger group. Blanket email’s are very impersonal and normally are seen by the student body as spam and so are marked as that in the email accounts. This is a major problem as some blanket emails are very important to everyone they were sent to, this ambiguity cause numerous problems. By stopping this practice the university would be able to seem more caring and have better communications with its students.

Conclusion

In conclusion humans perception is very important in decided the outcome of initial relationships with other people. People perceptions can change as quickly as they are decided, and are affected by all manner of external factors such as the environment and time of the situation. As well as this it is important for university’s to stay in contact with its student body and have clear channels of communication. These channels can be improved by stop sending blanket email, testing lectures communication skills and by cutting down the use of PowerPoint’s that don’t get to the point and boar many students.

Bibliography

Robbins (2010) [Powerpoint Document ]. [Accessed: 29 April 2012].