What Are You Communicating?

In every organisation, effective communication is vital. This is especially the case, however, in schools, particularly as the audience with which leaders at all levels are communicating is so varied. In a single day, for example, you may need to communicate effectively with parents, other professionals and governors or executive team members, not to mention also (if you work in a through-school environment like me!) students at university-entry level, teenagers, pre-teens and even pre-schoolers. Sometimes, you may need to switch between communication styles with members of all the groups above within just a few minutes, knowing all the while that you’ve got to pitch your delivery just right at every moment.

Early on in my own career, mostly just from watching one or two masters at work, I learned the importance of non-verbal communication in schools. Your presence as a teacher, I realised, makes a massive difference to how not only students but also other adults respond to you. Quite often, it wasn’t what you said that had the greatest impact upon the students in your lessons, but rather what you didn’t say. It was your demeanour, those ‘teacher looks’ you perfected over time, how you stood and waited silently and then watched the class fall silent, those little raised eyebrows or hand gestures that encouraged students to address minor issues, and so on. After a while – and many hours of practice – it was my energy and my flow which was doing most of the work for me in school.

A few years later, I found out that a lot of people – most notably Professor Albert Mehrabian – had spent a lot of time studying how communication, and especially non-verbal communication, actually works. During the 1960s, three decades before I even began my own teaching career, Professor Mehrabian noted that there are three core elements in the effective face-to-face communication of emotions or attitudes: non-verbal behaviour (facial expressions, for example), tone of voice, and the literal meaning of the spoken word. These three essential elements, he argued, account for how we convey our liking, or disliking, of another person. His particular focus was on the importance of such non-verbal clues when they appear to conflict with the words used and/or the tone in which they are spoken. Put very simply, Professor Mehrabian’s model pretty much states that 7% of the meaning of feelings and attitudes takes place through the words we use in spoken communications, while 38% takes place through tone and voice and the remaining 55% of communication of these factors take place through the body language we use, and most specifically via our facial expressions.

So, once I’d learned all this, I made an even bigger deal of getting non-verbal behaviour and communication right in every school I’ve worked, including during my most recent experiences as a Head Teacher in England and as a principal of an international school in the Middle East. Working abroad, especially in settings which are not only predominantly EAL but also formed from hugely diverse communities with vastly different cultural backgrounds, it’s so important to be able to communicate non-verbally in an effective manner. High standards of professional conduct always need to be present in a school anyway, obviously, but when you’re working as a visitor in another culture you’ve got to also understand and take into account local cultural norms and appreciate what the community you’re serving actually expect from the leaders of the schools they send their kids to. To this end, I’ve been keen to ensure that the colleagues I work alongside understand that every adult in a school should see themselves as a teacher because every interaction with a young person – and in particular the non-verbal communication we present via our body language – can teach them something about how we behave and how we value equality, fairness and inclusiveness within our school community, as well as how much we respect the customs of our local community.

It’s not only non-verbal communication which we need to get right, of course. But, if we remember that, according to Professor Mehrabian, only around 7% of our communication is via the words we use, then we need to ensure that we use our words incredibly wisely indeed. Perhaps the most effective means of making sure that this is the case is to keep our communication in school as simple and as easy-to-understand as possible at all times. Again, if you work in a school which is essentially EAL, as many international schools are, then this is of particular importance. A good starting point here is to make sure that leaders explain things clearly; don’t overcomplicate because you think you need to justify your status by sounding clever as frequently as you can, just keep everything nice and simple.

Similarly, most really good schools tend to develop a shared language over time, but there’s nothing wrong with stating explicitly in a school exactly what the common terms are that everyone will be using when describing key processes. This could be lesson visits instead of lesson observations or subject areas instead of departments, to name but two examples. Either way, what you don’t want are lots of different people within your school community describing what are essentially the same things in lots of different ways. This, clearly, will only likely lead to confusion. Again, keeping everything as simple as possible so that everyone understands exactly what everyone is talking about is great; complication and bewilderment, on the other hand, aren’t.

Another key point in an EAL environment is the modelling of high-quality linguistic norms. I am a linguist and I absolutely believe that all language is valid, but in a school environment it’s really important to only use standard English in its most effective form at all times. If you’ve got students who don’t typically speak English at home, whose parents have sent them to an international school partly at least because they want them to become highly adept, fluent English speakers and who will be sitting exams in English which are set by a UK-based exam board then they need to be accustomed to hearing and engaging with high-quality English all the time. If this means that you need to take a little more care with what you say, or even that you need to intersperse your conversational speech with terms which students ought to understand more readily, then so be it. Tailoring what you do for the needs of whichever community you currently serve will always be a vital component of your effective professional skillset.

On the subject of taking care with your speech, another point that I like to explain to my colleagues is what I call my parent-on-the-shoulder guidance. What this means, basically, is that when you’re speaking to a student – of any age – then you should imagine that their parent is also present whilst you’re talking. This way, I have found, teachers and other professionals tend to consider their words much more carefully and in my current school, as a result, we very rarely get any complaints about the manner in which students are spoken to. We take care with the words we use as well as the manner in which they’re spoken; communication is deliberate, simple and effective.

It’s also important, especially in this modern iteration of schooling, that a similar amount of care is applied to written communication. Emails and communication via apps and other online platforms, for example, is essentially a permanent record of conversations with all members of a school community, so the guidance I like to give in this regard is to only write what you would be happy to also have read out at a tribunal! Although this may seem like a fairly dramatic way of making a point, this usually leads to professionals being much more measured in how they pitch their written communication. Again, keep everything nice and simple, don’t overcomplicate and be super aware of who the recipients of your messages are and how your communication is likely to be either understood or perceived.

So, let’s summarise. It’s vital that communication in any school setting is effective. To this end, leaders need to consider the importance of all forms of communication, including non-verbal types. The most effective communication is often also the simplest, and all educational professionals should be clear about how both verbal and written communication is perceived by those receiving it.