Talk Ain’t Cheap: Why Effective Rhetoric and Communication is Vital for English Teaching Majors

Introduction

            In second grade, I had a particularly horrible teacher.  I cannot remember his name, but I do remember his complete and utter incompetence at explaining even the simplest concept to our class in a way we would understand.  One day, after a particularly ineffective lesson on verbs in which I was

Don't let a second grader take over your class.
Communicate!

being an extreme smart aleck, he snidely asked if I would like to teach the class.  Fully valuing the fact that he had finally recognized and accepted his own teaching ineptitude, I readily agreed, got up from my seat, strolled to the front of the class, and began to teach my second grade pupils on the value of verbs.  Needless to say, the subsequent events did not go well for me, and I was shoved back into my seat.  I realized much later that his unsuccessful teaching method came from the fact that he could not communicate with and engage his students.  I also realized much later what a rhetorical question was.

My experience illustrates an intriguing dilemma about teaching, especially English teaching: in a field all about communication, participation, and learning, why are so many teachers so ineffective at communicating to their students in a way that engages and endears them to their teacher?  We have all had terrible teachers.  Why, when they have chosen the profession of education and have all the necessary qualifications, are some so bad at what they do?  There might be several answers to this quandary.  For one, communication is not the only way to be successful in the classroom, so it can sometimes be forgotten as truly important.  Other ways to be a successful teacher are to grade quickly, enforce classroom rules, understand material completely, get along with staff, devote time to self-improvement, and love what you do.  These do not involve communication that much.  However, by far, the most important method for success is communication.  It governs nearly everything you will do as a teacher.  Your work is literally communicating and persuading students about literature, writing, and grammar, which are, in themselves, subparts of communication and persuasion.  Thus, communication is absolutely imperative to effective English teaching.  Without

These students are engaged in their English
           teacher's lesson because he can communicate
effectively to them.

effective communication, no teacher can be truly excellent.  The teachers might know the subject matter by heart.  They may have carefully constructed lesson plans.  But if teachers cannot engage students in learning the material, every carefully learned and crafted lesson goes to naught.  A bad teacher is usually a teacher who cannot communicate successfully.  Although teaching is more than just successful communication, as prospective English teaching majors, it is completely and utterly essential that you learn how to communicate and persuade well in your classes.  Learn these skills of communication now, and you will not be frustrated with your students later on.  In order to be the most effective teacher you can, you need to be able to effectively communicate on a general classroom level with the skills of clarity, arrangement, and entertainment, and on an individual basis with persuasiveness. 

Clarity in the Classroom

The most important communication will be in your classroom.  You talk the most in the classroom, and you affect the most people in the classroom.  The most important aspect of any teaching method is simply clarity.  The sign of any true comprehension of material is if you can teach it simply, carefully, and fully without any confusion, so teaching with clarity demonstrates how well you know certain material.  Simplicity is especially important when talking to a large group because the message must be comprehensible to everyone in the room, from the student with a knack for English to someone who cannot seem to grasp English concepts of grammar, literature, or writing.  This idea of clarity as the best means of teaching exists throughout history.  For example, in his De Doctrina Christiana, Saint Augustine instructed readers that the best way to teach a sermon to a large

Saint Augustine allows us to see the
               historical context and importance

of talking clearly without condescension 

group is to use simple language, but to not be tedious or over-repetitive (81).  The same principle applies not only to sermons, but also to English teaching.  You can easily slip into unwanted condescension about which St. Augustine so carefully warns us if you talk clearly but repetitively and below the level of your students.  Thus when teaching a lesson, you should always keep in mind your students as your audience and change how you teach a concept respectively.  For example, how you would explain a concept to an AP English classroom would be perhaps a more deep and complex explanation than how you explain a concept to a regular English class.  Although you will probably learn how to address different class scenarios when you do your teaching classes and student teaching, the course outcomes usually lack any mention of effective communication.  Thus, it is up to you to recognize the need for clarity when teaching.  When you use clarity and firm simplicity, your students will appreciate your teaching style and will respect you more for teaching effectively.  You will build up your character (known as ethos in rhetoric (Burton)) and admiration from students because you are concise and clear without any arrogance.

Arrangement in the Classroom

To communicate and persuade your students to learn, you need more than simply clarity.  How you arrange your lesson is also vital to effective communication.  Arrangement, in ancient Greece and Rome, was chiefly concerned with the exact order used in a usually persuasive oration (Burton), but today, arrangement is extremely important to all large-scale speaking and writing.  The importance of arrangement extends from the fact that the best way to competently teach is to form arguments and ideas that follow a logical and clarifying organization.  Many English teachers, especially those who only lecture, do not practice effective arrangement.  Even with carefully planned lessons, some teachers get easily sidetracked or jump quickly from one idea to another without any transitions or real arrangement.  I had one teacher my senior year of high school whom I regard as one of my worst teachers.  She knew her material and was highly intelligent, but she was so scatter-brained that I learned nothing from her.  Even if concepts are explained clearly, if your transitions between thoughts and ideas are as sudden, scatter-brained, and confusing like my teacher’s, all the clarity in the world will not really help successful communication in the classroom.  One of the best ways to help your arrangement is to use

We as teachers can use PowerPoints to assist
           our arrangement of our lessons.

technology such as PowerPoint and Prezi.  These presentations can add an entertainment value to your lessons, while also keeping you focused.  In order to avoid boredom, PowerPoint should be a guiding mechanism for an already basically memorized presentation, not just read out loud slide by slide.  By already knowing your own material well and by keeping to a logical and clear arrangement that moves from one idea to another, you will better help your students learn.

Entertainment in the Classroom

Today's students want instant entertainment
from their classroom experience.  We can
use entertainment to further the class
engagement levels and help classrooms learn!

Teaching high school students extends far beyond simply relaying information to your students.  In today’s world of easy and quick gratification and social media, everyone, especially teenagers, requires instant entertainment.  A huge conflict (called a stasis in rhetoric (Burton)) with teaching today is engaging students in a lesson while still maintaining a stimulating curriculum.  The best way to have the best of both worlds is to simply combine rigor with entertainment.  Thus, while your classes can still be challenging—and they should be challenging—your lessons should also have an element of entertainment.  For example, in Roman antiquity, Quintillian in his progymnasmata, writing exercises that taught grammar and how to speak and write effectively, made sure that his drills were entertaining as well as informative (Burton).  Today, our entertainment value can come from technology such as social media or videos.  However, because new technology is usually just a fad that passes rapidly, quick wit and humor inserted into your lesson is often the best way to engage students.  While you always want to remain authoritative, a pleasing and humorous speaking style (called middle style in rhetoric) will never go amiss in a classroom where students often demand entertainment.  English classes can include a ton of entertainment through wit in lessons.  For example, students might be required to diagram sentences to learn grammar, but diagraming “Josie engulfed the giant pickle into her pudgy pie hole” is much more entertaining than diagraming “Josie ate the large pickle.”  Entertained students will be usually be far more engaged in a lesson than those who are not entertained.  Teachers must always meld entertainment and engagement with the curriculum to truly help students learn.

Persuasion in One-on-One Situations

Parent and Student Meetings with you do not need
to be heated or angry experiences.  Through
persuasion to your side of a situation, parents
and students will be appeased and respect
you as an authoritative figure.

Although most of your time will be spent in the classroom, and thus most of your university learning will be geared to teaching whole classes, we often forget that we must also communicate with others on an individual basis, either with parents, students, or faculty members.  Without knowledge of persuasion as well as communication techniques, you will not be able to successfully solve issues with individuals.  Your audience has changed from a large group of people to a few or one.  How you approach individuals versus an entire classroom must also change.  Clarity and arrangement are no longer essential for your argument, but rather frank but appeasing talk is vital to convince individuals about your point.  This switch in communication is due to the fact that the context of your situation has changed, and your language must also.  For example, much of the time, the people, especially parents and students, you will be dealing with on an individual basis will be angry or frustrated at grades, behavior in the class, or other problems that classrooms typically encounter throughout the year.  Large classrooms usually do not present heated situations.  Thus, the language you use in a large classroom will be much different than the language you use to address angry individuals.  This change in language often involves an increase in persuasion for individuals.  Persuasion rather than just simple communication is much more important on an individual basis than with classrooms.  In the classrooms, your job is to teach and instruct while engaging the student’s attention and learning.  Individually, while you might be still instructing if a student has a question about an essay or assignment, you will most likely be convincing someone of your side of a situation in order to explain a bad grade or horrendous behavior.  You will be using rhetoric, the art of persuasion (Burton).  Successful individual persuasion will allow parents to accept a bad grade as reality without making you the “bad-guy.”  However, without successful persuasion on an individual basis, students and parents will likely still be angry, and you will not garner from them the respect as a successful teacher you deserve.  I have seen teachers both convince and fail to convince me that I deserved an unwanted grade.  I respected the persuasive one and continued to be frustrated with the unconvincing teacher.  Although, not commonly part of an English Teaching major’s university courses, in order to be a respected and successful teacher, it is imperative that you learn how to persuade individuals to accept your side of a situation. 

Conclusion

With successful communication and persuasion,
you can become the best English teacher you
could ever be!

Communication and persuasion are essential to the English teacher.  Although we teach communication, we are occasionally surprisingly ineffective at communicating effectively to our class and individuals.  However, in order to teach well, as we all want to do, we must be able to master the art of communication and persuasion through clarity, arrangement, entertainment, and persuasiveness.  With effective communication and persuasion, students will listen and learn from you, and a second-grader won’t try to take over your lesson. 

                                                   Works Cited

Augustine, Saint.  De Doctrina Christiana. Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d. Online Christian Library. Web. 13 Dec. 2014

Burton, Gideon.  Silva Rhetorica. Brigham Young University, n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2014.