Communication breakdowns in the classroom

We are all willing to innovate in our classrooms, that is for granted. Teachers, students, we all want to try new things in our daily basis of education. However, it usually happens that we do not think for a while and check whether effective communication is taking place or not. It is really important to achieve a good grade of communication with our students. Otherwise, innovation will never take place because of the lack of understanding.

For instance, I found myself the other day in a classroom of innovation of the master in education where my teacher found out that there was a communication breakdown. It was easy to discover due to previous activities in which every student, instead of asking questions related to the content of the subject, just hesitated to ask about its syllabus or the way of assesment. The teacher inmediately tried to solve the situation by dedicating a whole lesson to our syllabus which explained hwo we were going to focus on classroom research, the teachers, the students and many other interesting aspects.

Nevertheless, it may seem easy to solve one of this situations, we may think that the reasons are always obvious but the reality is that there may be a lot of reasons like a bad explanation by the teacher, students' missunderstandings or even simple reasons like the disapproval of the teacher by the students.

In short, it is important to keep this kind of situations under control because if we do not focus on this, it may be too late when we want to realize about it.

P.D: I was thinking about the problem of communication within the classroom and I just found two videos on youtube which may be interesting. They are basically related to constructing students' expectations in the classroom. They just talk about logic things we all know but it is always worthy to just have a look.

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