Or, lessons from a summer in the classroom
I’ve just finished teaching two courses for the summer term in the Professional Writing and Communications graduate certificate, a program I helped to develop at Humber College. This summer’s courses were External Communications (think news releases and media kits, speechwriting, grant applications, fundraising letters). Also a Project Management course, in which the students tackle a marketing challenge on behalf of a real client. At the end of teaching courses, a teacher always reflects back on how you could have taught them better. In other words, what you will do next time. I also think about how teaching helps me articulate my writing and editing process more clearly to clients. Here are some of the lessons I learned this summer:
Missing steps can lead to confusion when you’re trying to communicate a process
One challenge of teaching a skill to another human is that it forces you to think out all the steps. As a teacher, I can sometimes forget an essential detail in an assignment because it seems so obvious to me, having done the task many times. But questions and confusion make me realize that it’s really a missed step. For example, in teaching how to write news releases, it’s important to review the specifics of what makes a newsy tone.
Takeaway for client work? Being forced to regularly break down tasks helps me think to communicate my process to clients. For example, to confirm tone and to make sure we are on the same page about the elements needed to achieve that tone. For students, the confusion comes in not having much experience with a newsy tone. The fix is to share many examples and discuss what makes the writing sound factual and authoritative. With clients, sometimes a discussion on tone will focus on different ideas of what informality sounds like.
Sharing models helps to understand the outcome
This one comes up in my life as a writer when new clients want to see samples that are as close as possible to the thing they want me to create for them. They want to know I can do the work. Students are also eager to see models of what success looks like in an assignment. I used to be concerned about sharing these, fearing that students would simply copy that format it would stifle their own creativity or their learning in thinking through the process. However, in taking an online course myself recently, I once again experienced the flipside. Without a model it can be hard to know what is being asked. Now as I share models, I try to provide two or three examples that are a bit different. To both clients and students. That way I demonstrate that there’s more than one way the final product can look, but still put them in the ballpark.
Soft skills still hardest to teach
In my project management course, I’m always reminded of the value of so-called soft skills like teamwork and leadership. In this course, we spend a couple of classes at the beginning on exercises and discussions around these topics. From personality tests to reflections, we devote time to deepening our understanding and sharing experiences. The students even create a “team charter” where they lay out the ground rules for their collaboration, from deadlines to communications channels. To the students, it all seems a bit extra to spend time on these elements until the end. Then they realize that addressing these elements first helps them to be more mindful of them through the work. In their end-of-term reflections, students share their own growth through the project process. They often reflect that the challenges of group dynamics, delegation, and clashing learning styles can all be more manageable when you realize they are all normal and part of the process.
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