Communication in the Education Field (Prompt #3)

By: Jessica Lusky

I interviewed my mom who works in the education field in regards to the way she communicates with other individuals at work. Most of her responses were what I expected, but the few that surprised me were very interesting and helped further my understand of the education field. I began by asking her why she chose to pursue a job in the education field and she replied with “I always knew I wanted to work with children, specifically special education. I have a bit of a ‘servant leader’ mindset in which I truly gain the most joy helping others. My passion is to empower children to build their own identity and agency”. I thought it was very interesting how closely I could relate to her response, while going into a similar field with a very different goal. I then asked her what she finds the major

misconceptions of her field to be before getting into the communication aspects. She has found that individuals think teachers only work during the scheduled school day, teachers have their summers off, and that they teach all children the same, which are all inaccurate. Also, she has heard that teachers all teach subjects when in reality they teach human beings making their work more challenging. Next I began to ask her the communication related questions. I asked my mom what she uses writing for in her field and she responded with many more situations than I would have expected from a speech therapist in a high school. She explained that she uses writing to “log interactions with our students to document how and when we worked with the individual or group of students, observe and document student learning and thinking as feedback, to share narratives of student’s learning and growth, communicate with parents, share ideas, create lessons for students, create presentations for professional development, and for publications including books, magazines, etc.”. All of the situations that she uses writing for make complete sense, I just would not have thought about writing for publications, sharing narratives of student’s growth and learning, or sharing ideas off the top of my head. I followed up by asking how she writes in these situations to better understand the necessary circumstances for writing that I did not think of myslef. She described the way she writes in different situations which includes a variety of formats such as hand written and digital logs, commenting/noting alongside student documents while observing, emailing, social media in order to gain and share ideas, blogging, specifically Weebly, to learn as an educator, and lastly on google slides for presentations. Lastly, I asked my mom how she uses these communication techniques to address the misconceptions she has noticed since working in the education field. The main thing she does is attend and connect with educators at professional learning opportunities “as a means to collaborate, communicate, and give back to our profession”. Along with that she continues to share her stories of learning as an educator on social media and works to build relationships with parents and community members(Lusky).

Source:
Lusky, Erika. Personal Interview. 3 March. 2017.