I was just listening to a podcast called THIS AMERICAN LIFE. This particular podcast was called GOT YOU PEGGED. The idea is that you can be talking to someone in your own language, own country, own town and you can still have no idea what they are talking about. Communication is all about perceptions and these are all different in each person (this article calls this interpretation). Just like we can be looking at the same piece of art and see totally different things.
In this article I love the idea that a principal or leader needs to have a communication flow that is both downward and upward. It is the upward flow that has to be encouraged. I feel myself very comfortable communicating upward. I don’t always believe that my principal and are communicate easily with each other, but we are both willing listeners and work towards understanding.
The process of filtering communication can be important. There are often items that I feel as a teacher are not important for me to know though they are important. Finances for example have been difficult for our school due to taxes. This doesn’t affect my teaching and I would rather have others take care of it. Unless it becomes an issue that we all have to gather around and discuss, I often welcome some filtering.
Rumors? So I have to confess here that I am the wife of an administrator. Everyone assumes that I know all that is going on when in fact my husband and I talk very little about school. I am usually the last to find out about gossip. I find that our principal deals with rumors head on. He states what the rumor is he has heard and address it candidly to stop the wildfire spread. Communication has become such an important issue in our school that we now have a communications person. That is their job. We are a big school 2500 students and we need a person who handles the mass media and creates an image of the school with visual media.
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