Communication skills in a school placement.

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Essay: Communication skills

In 2008, I worked in a school for two and-a-half weeks as part of my work experience. During this time I used relevant skills that helped me to communicate with the pupils successfully. However, at times there were many skills that were inappropriate to use or were not relevant to use at that specific time. Some of these effective communication skills include verbal communication as well as non-verbal communication such as eye-contact.

The most important communication skills that are needed in a working environment are verbal and non-verbal communication.

Verbal communication comes in the form of language, however, language can not only be oral (i.e. spoken), but visual (i.e. written or printed) or gestural. I have used this type of communication skill whilst explaining to the students the small task that needed to completed during the lesson. For example, I wrote on the white board all the instructions of the task that need to be completed in bullet points so that they can follow it easily. My handwriting was also big so that all the students could see it properly. Not only that but once I wrote the instructions down I explained to them using oral communication what I wrote on the board. Most of the students understood the task including what I wrote on the board as well as what I had said. However, some of the students were still quite confused as to what I was saying. Therefore they needed more clarification.

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This may be for a number of reasons including the sentence length and complexity. For instance, when I was speaking to the students I was using long sentences which some of them did not seem to understand. The ability to understand a sentence depends partly on the capacity and duration of the working memory; the working memory can typically hold information for anything between 5 and 30 seconds. Most of the students were around 8-9 years of age so I should have spoken in smaller sentences so that they could understand and take everything in fully.

Another important type ...

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