Hear from Agriculture Prof. Mike Kaller

Transcript

I incorporate communication intensive teaching into three courses: human dimensions and natural resources, our capstone course here in the natural resource college in management, and an introduction to aquatic entomology for two purposes.

The feedback process enhances student learning. Instead of doing an assignment, seeing a grade and moving on, the students have an opportunity to address weaknesses in their technical knowledge and communication skills and improve those. But more importantly, many of us have found that teaching material enhances one's own learning and the material. Similarly, learning to communicate about technical knowledge enhances the understanding of the technical knowledge itself. Therefore, the scaffolding process, the feedback process, the focus on communication that communication-intensive classes have, actually, also served to reinforce and technical knowledge that we want the students to gain in the courses. The critical thinking and problem solving—all the goals of the courses—are enhanced by that process.

Prior to having communication-intensive aspects in my courses, one of the things that students would do is, as we've all experienced, is memorize something for an activity or or do an activity and then forget about it. And I find that the communication-intensive process—the staying with projects and topics through the process of feedback—enhances retention dramatically. I didn't expect that, but it is really clear to me that, as I meet students in subsequent semesters or later in their careers, they really remember the activities or communication-intensive activities where they did the feedback process. They remember this, much more than the one-off activities that we did in class. So teaching communication-intensive courses has really made me think about my communication and professional conferences and in my writing. 

So like all of us, you know I publish research papers, and peer reviewed journals, write book chapters, and go to conferences, and give presentations, and make posters. But the recognition of the process of putting those together has been really highlighted by the process of teaching about that kind of communication. You know, instead of just getting the feedback, as I was in graduate school—”oh you're a good writer, this is good, this is good”—it didn't really help me understand what I was doing correctly, you know. Getting reviews back and saying, “fix this; do this; this wasn't clear; add these words.” Again, doesn't really, it doesn't really talk about the process of how that was put together. So by thinking about these courses and thinking about how the deliberate selection of measurements carries forward to what kind of data you can generate, carries forward to what you can talk about, and explaining that to students has made me think a lot more about how I'm going to put how I did that in my own research into my writing and into my presentations about the research. The introspection of thinking about how I would grade my own work as a C-I instructor has been better feedback than I've gotten from any review or graduate advisor. And it's probably something that I wish I would have done to my own professional communication, a long time ago.