Online Teaching Tip #26 - Your Tone Matters in Teaching Online
A Story of Miscommunication
I was working with a vendor who was quite terse in his emails. He came across as curt, and I started to assume, because of his communication style, that he was rude and that he didn't care much for our business relationship.
Then I had the opportunity to spend over an hour on the phone with him as he tried to figure out a technical problem for us. Just hearing his accent explained a lot: he was from New York. If you have friends or relatives from that part of the country, you know that they communicate differently, and to an outsider, they can come off as brusque. Because of the tone of his online communication, I drew the conclusion that this guy didn't care much about supporting us. It turns out that he was willing to go the extra mile when we encountered a real technical issue.
If you are brief and to-the-point in your grading comments and emails, you're likely to get misinterpreted by your students.
I see this dynamic at work between online instructors and their students. If you are brief and to-the-point in your grading comments and emails, you're likely to get misinterpreted by your students. This is especially true if you have high expectations, and believe your students can do excellent work. If that's the case, you are going to have to explain to your students a bit about how you communicate and how you grade.
Here are a couple ways to help your students understand your tone online:
1) Send out a "How I Communicate" email. Explain how you might be perceived, tell them a bit about your expectations, and be sure to communicate your belief that they can rise to meet those expectations.
2) Send out a "How I Communicate" video. If they can see your face and hear your voice, they will begin reading that voice into their email communications. You'll seem less distant, and you'll be able to overcome some of those limitations of text-based communication.
Online Teaching Tip #24 – Give Them Structure
I've been touching on some common bad habits that online teachers fall into. Tip #22 addressed the bad habit of checking email as the first thing you do in your teaching day or week. Tip #23 addressed the bad habits that flow from an obsession with covering material. The final bad habit in this set of three is the habit of dropping resources and assignments into a online course site without some kind of framework or method. I can't tell you how many sites I've seen that look like a pile of links. As a student, this is very disorienting.
A lot of this goes back to how you've designed and organized your course site. Your students need course structure that makes sense. Here are 3 quick tips to keeping your online class site structured.
1. If your site already has that, then use it. If it doesn't then create topic headings (in Moodle these are called "labels") where you keep assignments or readings in a common area.
2. When you add new resources or a new assignment, be sure to contact your students and let them know where they have been placed on the course site.
3. Finally, when adding resources, be sure to give them a title that makes sense to your students.
Online Teaching Tip #23 – A Bad Habit To Avoid
If you've read through some of these online teaching tips, or read my book, Excellent Online Teaching, you've picked up on the fact that I believe good online teaching is built on good habits. You've probably had a teacher in high school or college who got by on charisma. You didn't learn much from them, but at least they were likeable. That kind of teacher won't last a semester online. Teaching online demands that we jettison bad habits and build a repertoire of good teaching habits. I try to stay on the positive side of things, but nn Online Teaching Tip #22, I addressed a particular bad habit that can derail your entire week. In this tip, I want to address another one of those bad habits, and offer some alternatives.
To set this up, I need to reference a conversation I had a few weeks back. I was talking with a student who had recently graduated from a well-respected school. Reflecting on his years of education there, he said:
"I was surprised that they (my teachers) didn't really care to hear my questions; it's like they didn't want me to think on my own."
I've been trying to figure out the bad habit behind this one. Was it his instructors' failure to really listen? Perhaps. Maybe it was that they just didn't care about him as a person? No, that's not it. I think it's a problem, really a habit (surprise, surprise) that we all have a hard time with: that we are driven by a need to cover as much content as possible.
When I first started teaching, I was aghast at how little my students knew about the subject matter. I felt like I needed to do two years of work just to get them up to speed. Then I had to teach everything that we were supposed to cover for that year. So, I fell into really two bad habits:
1 - Thinking that teaching = covering content
2 - Thinking that the responsibility of learning was on my shoulders (I was teacher-centered).
The result is that you don't have time to listen to your students. You forget that they have questions. Inquiry wilts on the vine while we pour content over them in the hope that they'll absorb it. I call this one a meta-habit because it generates other poor teaching habits. Howard Hendricks, one of my favorite teachers of teachers has said:
If you want to cover something, then use a blanket.
What's the alternative?
1. Get a copy of Maryellen Weimer's book Learner-Centered Teaching. Or you can read my extended book review here on this site.
2. As you facilitate your online courses, get in a habit of asking generative questions. What I mean by generative question is asking questions that stimulate inquiry.
3. Ask yourself, "How am I asking my students to use the content this week and not just to understand it."