“Because we are teachers,” says Dee Hansen, “oral communication is our primary form of instruction. Effective verbal and nonverbal communication skills are critical for creating successful learning environments.”

Here are some of Hansen’s best pieces of advice for effective communication:

1. Know your students.  Be sensitive to and knowledgeable about your students’ cultural values, beliefs, behavioral norms, and types of disabilities.
    
2. Use your voice.  Speak clearly at a reasonably moderate rate. Use varied pitch, speed, and color in your voice to emphasize points, give directions, and acknowledge your students. Don’t be afraid to repeat instructions or new concepts.
    
3. Save your voice.  Nonverbal communication can provide feedback, directional signals, and emotion. Model how to perform a technique or musical passage rather than talking about it.
    
4. Facilitate attention and thinking.  Use short, direct, active, and positive sentences when you instruct. Use effective questioning techniques to foster thinking—from recall to synthesis and evaluation—in your students.
    
5. Use visual aids.  As an aural art, music is very challenging for visual learners. Communicate more clearly about music’s elements, concepts, and genres by using graphic organizers, color coding, bullets, charts, symbols or icons, and easy-to-read fonts or handwriting.
    
6. Practice what you teach.  Organize and practice your lessons as part of your lesson planning. For more complex concepts or tricky musical passages, speak your instruction to yourself or another person before trying it in class. Self-assess your own teaching performance, and keep notes on how to better communicate your instructional goals next time.
    

MENC member Dee Hansen is an associate professor and chair of graduate studies in music education at the Hartt School, University of Hartford, West Hartford, Connecticut.

--Ella Wilcox, January 6, 2009, © MENC: The National Association for Music Education (www.menc.org)
 

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