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Empowering Students to Overcome Communication Apprehension
Episode transcript for Communication Corner, a McGraw-Hill podcast.
Full Episode Transcript
Jeff Child:
Welcome to the Communication Corner, a McGraw Hill podcast for the communication discipline. I'm your moderator for the session, Jeff Child. Today I've brought together three fantastic guests to talk about our focus of the podcast today about empowering students to overcome communication apprehension. I'll have each guest introduce themselves and then we'll dive into the topic at hand by posing some critical questions and having some discussion related to our overarching theme. Again, welcome. I am your moderator. My name is Jeff Child. I'm a whole professor and chair of the Department of Communication Studies at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I'm a McGraw Hill author, and I've been involved with helping students with their anxiety and their communication skills for over 20 years, and I'm excited to serve as a moderator for this panel today. So before we dive into some questions, I want my guests to introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about themselves. So we'll start with Milia.
Milia Heen:
Hi, my name is Dr. Milia Heen. I'm an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy and Leadership. My background is actually in criminal justice and criminology, so looking at various research involving tourist safety and experiences, but more recently and related to this podcast really focusing on this idea of resilience building in our students and helping them with different communication and social emotional tools. So really excited to be here.
Jeff Child:
Thank you. Excited to have you, Milia. Next is Nick Barr. Nick, do you want to introduce yourself?
Nick Barr:
Sure, thanks. So I'm Dr. Nick Barr. I'm an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at UNLV. And yeah, my research focuses on risk and protective factors in the context of trauma exposure and kind of related mental health consequences. But I've been working with Dr. Heen in this class that she mentioned to support resilience, anxiety management, and kind of some other mental health-related goals for our students here at UNLV. And I have a clinical background. Before I joined the academy, I was a clinician for like, 15 years and I still do some of that work.
Jeff Child:
Wonderful. Super excited for the two of them to talk about some of the fantastic things that they've done a little later in the podcast about in our introductory course and helping students to overcome their anxieties. And last but not least is Chad Edwards. Chad, you want to introduce yourself?
Chad Edwards:
Hi, I'm Dr. Chad Edwards. I'm a distinguished professor of communication at Western Michigan University and a research fellow at [inaudible 00:02:48] in Aachen, Germany. I also co-direct the Communication and Social Robotics labs with Dr. Autumn Edwards, my partner in life and science, and Dr. Patrick Spence at the University of Central Florida. Our lab is a worldwide consortium of about 25 individuals over five or six universities worldwide. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Jeff.
Jeff Child:
Yeah, excited to have you all here today. All right, so let's dive into the topic. Before we turn to some questions, I just want to lay out why when we started thinking about topics, I chose this focus on communication apprehension more broadly rather than public speaking anxiety. I wanted us to have a more holistic discussion about how we can help students beyond just the public speaking class, to feel more comfortable putting themselves out there, networking, interacting in different ways to form and strengthen their relationships with a variety of people across their lifetime. In communication programs, we often put a lot of emphasis on anxiety associated with public speaking, but the broader domain of interacting in a range of situations is really important for our students too. So I'm excited about the discussion today. So to kick off our first question for discussion, I want to have some dialogue about why does a focus in this day and age on broad effective communication skills matter and being able to control anxiety levels when interacting with others.
And I'll just provide a couple thoughts on the topic and then throw it out to the group to see what others think. My research broadly focuses on personal and mediated interactions, and we have a lot of evidence that mediated communication practices can help strengthen our relationships. We think about Zoom and Skype and when we're away from people we love, we have all these opportunities to keep those bonds strong, but we also have a lot of evidence that they can further isolate us too, communication technologies. The Surgeon General advisory last year raised the alarm and noted that loneliness and isolation is a major public health crisis impacting society today. So why is that? Well, my students tell me that it's not uncommon for them to seek interacting with others as a last resort before they text, check in on them on social media and being sucked into their own digital devices.
During the pandemic, people receded into their homes to socially distance themselves and protect their physical health. But a consequence of this has been more fear and difficulty in connecting with others. At UNLV, we teach a lot of minority populations and first generation college students, and these students are sometimes fearful to build connections with others, create a network of support and establish fulfilling relationships, which are all needed skills if they're going to thrive in the world of work and personally throughout their lives. So all of these things really point in my estimation, to a generation today who has weaker interpersonal skills and higher levels of anxiety at the prospect of interacting with people in face-to-face settings. Those skills ironically have gotten weaker for a lot of people. So what do the rest of you think about this question of why focusing in this day and age on broad communication skills and being able to control anxiety levels matters?
Milia Heen:
So I think for me, just thinking about students, even students that are choosing to take some of these online classes, they still have such a hesitation in reaching out to people. And although the world of work is transforming, that there's a lot more remote work, you still have to reach out to people, but there's just this kind of fear and anxiety and apprehension that they have and even doing that even in an online format. And so if you're able to be in an online class and you have that apprehension, what is that going to look like when you're having a face-to-face conversation with someone and just being so in your head on being able to even just start a conversation with someone, right?
Jeff Child:
Yeah, it's true. We think about during the pandemic, we transform educational practices and did a lot of remote teaching, but that makes it difficult sometimes for people to feel comfortable reaching out and knowing how to start conversations. Yeah, for sure. Other thoughts or perspectives?
Nick Barr:
Yeah, I mean, I would add, I think again, coming from more maybe of a mental health lens that there've been some positive developments in the way that the terminology of mental health as kind of permeated popular culture and youth culture specifically. So I think folks, I'm in my early forties, but folks younger than me are more comfortable talking about mental health diagnoses, their mental health needs, just typically used in a language of mental health. And I think that's very positive because we know one of the barriers to seeking mental health care or improving mental health outcomes is stigma, right? When you feel a sense of stigma and you don't want to communicate your needs. So I think that's positive. But on the other side, we see kind of a parallel to one of the downfalls that can happen in therapy where we lean maybe too heavily on validation of experience and not enough on change or overcoming obstacles.
So I think I've heard from some of my students that X behavior makes them anxious, for example, participating in class, and therefore maybe they shouldn't have to do that is their kind of calculation, rather than identifying that anxiety as something that's transient and that can be overcome. But of course, it's sensitive. You have to before pushing for change, do that validation piece. But I think that part of the therapeutic discourse may have been lost as it was translated into popular youth culture. So we have the terminology, but we're missing the piece that's oriented around change behavior to overcome some of those experiences that by the way, are very valid and legitimate. I mean, it's profoundly destabilizing to be stuck at home and only communicating with people online during critical developmental periods. I mean, there's no reason people should have these skills if they haven't had the opportunity to learn them.
Jeff Child:
Yeah, that's a good point is that we've just been through and continue to deal with situations where sometimes we're more isolated and we need to practice and identify it. You're right about the mental health stuff. We are far more willing to talk about that. I think about my partner whenever we are out places, he's like, "You will talk to anyone." And I'm like, "Yeah, I have no problem striking up a casual conversation with anyone." He's like, "I'm in my head most of the time. I worry, what if they reject me? What if I won't have something to say?" I'm like, "What if? Then you move on to the next person." So I think sometimes we put so much of our own identity into general interpersonal interactions with people that we don't often stop and think, "Do I really need to put the validation for those people at risk in having a simple five-minute interaction with someone?" But we do. So it's been interesting for me to watch him open up more and see it less risky as he sees me do it in a variety of contexts and situations.
Chad Edwards:
And I would add, I think as we see the public change and we see more, as Dr. Barr stated, focus on issues of mental health on TikTok and a lot of people getting diagnoses and more identity issues and more things coming out where it's more acceptance at the level, even in academics, right? Professorships are changing to be more acknowledging of these issues and helping students and maintaining that mental stable balance. So we are seeing these changes rapidly occurring at the same time while technology's providing sort of a global aspect to where we can get engaged with that, understand it. It also can cause issues as well. And so it's a mixed bag, but I do think we're seeing changing to where issues of mental health really do matter and they've always mattered, but we just don't see them in the public discourse like we see them today.
Jeff Child:
Yeah, good point. Great discussion. All right, I want to turn the focus a little bit to what Milia and Nick have been working on here at UNLV. They are working with a common required course that all majors in our college take. They both play an important role in this class with their different backgrounds coming at this issue of trying to help improve students' communication and connection skills. So if you two want to talk a little bit about the course and some of your interactions with students in the class and the questions that kind of ground your thinking, and then we can have some discussion together about some of the things that you bring up.
Milia Heen:
Yeah, definitely. So the class that we're kind of referencing is this first year seminar class that all students take as incoming freshmen when they come to UNLV. So it's a really great starting point to meet with students on day one. And the focus is kind of we've alluded to is this idea that loneliness and isolation is this pressing issue in our country. You've got students coming to a new experience transitioning to college, and we want to be able to provide them with tools and strategies that they can start building as freshmen in day one that they'll use and grow over the course of the semester, but then certainly throughout their entire experience here at UNLV. And the class is really focused on this idea of resilience building and taking a proactive approach to resilience and wanting students to have the skills and strategies to be resilient.
So that's kind of the general framework, and we really see that through this idea of social emotional wellness and then being able to enhance those two different areas. And so in thinking about communication apprehension, being able to have the tools that they need, both communication tools, interpersonal, these social tools is one piece of it. But then that certainly interacts with this idea of these other emotional wellness tools that they're going to need to manage stress. How do they manage that anxiety? So really being able to provide them with the tools to develop those relationships given loneliness and isolation is such a big issue. But then even when they are moving towards having conversations with people, do they have the skills to start a conversation? Being able to provide them with some positive communication tools of how to greet people, how to ask questions for really meaningful conversations.
And so using that as a starting point when they're freshmen, and the other really big piece of it just that I want to mention too is this class is made up of all different majors within our college. So it's not just communication students or criminal justice students. And what we really want everyone to learn is that these tools that you're going to need to be resilient or adaptable in situations are tools that you're going to need regardless of what career path you go into. And they're certainly going to help with overcoming communication apprehension and really being able to build relationships. And Nick, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about your involvement in the course and just thinking about this emotional regulation and intention control piece of it as well.
Nick Barr:
Yeah, thanks. So I think the kind of area where I contribute is as Dr. Heen mentioned, these kind of related overlapping domains of attention control and emotion regulation. So another way of describing that construct is mindfulness, but that's a broad and deep construct with certainly ongoing debate about how we can best define it. But the way that we define it in the course is attention control, so non-judgmental observation of mental events like thoughts, feelings, behavioral urges, physical sensations, non-judgmental observation of those events without judgment or reactivity. So essentially noticing what's going on in your mind without reacting to it by getting really attached or avoiding, which are sort of the two classic responses. And what we suggest in the course is that by honing this ability to notice without judgment your internal state and the internal experiences you're having, you're better able to respond to those in a way that fits your goals.
And so in a particular interaction we could, that example might be I go up to talk to somebody for the first time, whether it's a classmate because I'm a freshman, I don't know anybody, or I want to go talk to a professor in their office hours, and I observe this experience of anxiety. Typically, what people do when they feel anxiety is try to avoid it, like leave the situation or whatever, but that might not be consistent with the goal of meeting a new friend or getting whatever it is you need from your professor at their office hours. So observing that experience of anxiety, not reacting to it, not judging it, but just noticing it's there allows us a little bit of space and we can fill that space with other skills like tools to regulate emotion, whether that's as simple as taking a few deep breaths to try to calm the heartbeat and reduce sympathetic nervous system activation, or maybe it's rehearsing a couple of phrases in your mind.
Whatever the kind of skill that the person is practicing is, you need to have that space, that space between observing the inner experience of anxiety and reacting to it in order to apply the skill. So that's essentially what we do is introduce this idea of mindfulness defined by non-judgmental observation of inner experience. And then we do a little practice, a little bit of formal meditation practice, which is a very good way to build that skill. And then we introduce a couple of other emotion regulation skills that have support in the research literature to help people feel more calm, less activated, and behave in a way that's consistent with goals and values rather than whatever emotion I feel at the moment.
Jeff Child:
That's fantastic. And as you've worked with these beginning students with these principles of regulating their emotion, being mindful of what they're experiencing and then taking some opportunity to develop skills, what has the experience been like for students as they go through this?
Milia Heen:
So I think one thing we really focus on in the class that Nick touched on is being able to learn through experience. And so actually going through these mindfulness techniques and doing some meditations, and the same can be said for practicing these communication skills. So as you would expect, if people are feeling a lot of anxiety when we say, "Okay, now we're going to go practice greetings outside of the classroom with people that we don't know," there's this, "I'm actually good. I'm not going to go do that. It's too scary. I'm feeling anxious." But if we can take some time to do some breathing techniques before they're doing it, we see that it actually isn't that bad and they feel more confident prepared to go do these things.
And then again, going through that experience as they're talking to people, giving them some reminders of really what is your intentions here? What are your goals? Trying to focus your attention. So I think really having them practice these skills in low stakes environments in a safe space where it's okay to mess up. That's kind of the whole point of this, having a growth mindset and trying these things out, that has certainly helped them a lot, rather than we're telling them these techniques, hoping they go practice it, being able to do it with them and talk about their experience as they're experiencing it.
Jeff Child:
That's fantastic.
Nick Barr:
Yeah, I think this is a really good point. This idea that there has to be kind of a, this idea of the growth mindset, right? There has to be sort of a mental shift or reframing around the experience of anxiety or discomfort because I think we have a lot of folks come in and they have this idea that anxiety makes me uncomfortable, therefore it's bad, therefore whatever is causing me to feel this way is bad. And that actually intuitively kind of makes sense, right? Well, doing this new thing makes me feel anxious. I don't want to feel anxious, therefore this whole scenario is bad and I got to just get out of here. And I think what you need to help people understand is that discomfort is part of skills acquisition. There is no skill acquisition without discomfort, and the analogy can be drawn to sports or learning a language, a musical instrument.
Now, you pick up a guitar for the first time, it feels weird. Your hands feel weird, it kind of hurts. It's just strange. The same thing with learning a new language. It's like, the most anxiety provoking experience ever trying to speak to somebody in a language that you haven't fully mastered, but you will not achieve mastery without passing through discomfort. So it's helping people to understand that discomfort is transient, anxiety is transient, these are transient experiences on the road to skill acquisition. They're not things to be afraid of or avoided.
And this is kind of related to the broad idea of resilience. Resilience we can understand as experience something difficult or negative and not having it diminish your level of functioning, or when it does diminish your level of functioning, you return to your previous level or exceed it. And that's what we're hoping for here, that people will experience discomfort, they'll want to get away from it, but they'll make a decision using some of these mindfulness skills. "Okay, I'm feeling this, but I know that discomfort is part of a process of skill acquisition, so I'm going to tolerate it." And then they will exceed that previous level of functioning. And that's what we mean by resilience.
Jeff Child:
I love it. Yeah, when I started here and became familiar with these approaches and the impact that we're having with students, I'm so excited and amazed to see it because as these first generation college students that we have in our class go through the curriculum, it's not just about knowledge. It's not just about, "Oh, I have all these theories and understanding of how to engage in my profession." You also need to network and you need to build relationships and that will help you in opening doors for your future. And it can be scary and it can involve risk, and we're helping them to take those steps of being more interactive and more aware of what they're doing. So I just really appreciate all the efforts that the two of you and the others who teach this course provide for our students because it really is transformational in a time and day and age when they need more training and more perspective on how to be effective in addition to, because some of these people who need it, they're not going to come anywhere near a comm class.
They're going to be like, "Ah, this brings me anxiousness and nervous energy and I'm just going to avoid it." So we have to bring it to them in places and give them the fundamental pieces that will help them across their career. All right, let's turn our focus a little bit to Chad, and Chad works with technology and robots and how artificial intelligence can help us with decreasing communication apprehension. We've already talked about how technology can be part of the problem in isolating us and weakening our interpersonal communication and connection skills, but it can also be an answer. So Chad, do you want to present your question? Just provide us some thoughts and then we can open it up to further discussion.
Chad Edwards:
Yeah, sure. So the question I was thinking about was how can and do robots and artificial intelligence help students overcome communication apprehension and sort of what's the future of this technology? And I think number one, robots and AI can provide a safe practice environment. It offers people or students safe, low pressure space to practice public speaking, speaking with others in difficult conversations or simply just interacting with others without that fear of judgment, because we programmed the AI and robots to provide that supportive communication. Our lab has done a study in which students had to give a speech in front of a robot or a person, and while they preferred giving the speech in front of the person, the robot still had high levels of credibility and social presence, and so it did help students in terms of practicing. And also think about often when we see communication labs or speech labs, there are people who are evaluating those speeches or offering positive or even negative feedback sometimes to students.
Those evaluators get tired, they can be frustrated, they can be bored, they've heard the same speech over and over again. So that sort of leaks across in terms of their feedback. But robots don't do that. A robot can go 24 hours unlike a person. Two, AI systems, especially like virtual agents, can analyze speech patterns for tone and sort of nonverbal behaviors and provide feedback very specifically on that. There are early systems out right now, they're not the greatest, but it's likely to improve dramatically every six months we see in this space. And we conducted a study a few years ago published in ComEd in which we had students present a speech to either a social robot, Pepper, which is about four and a half feet tall, or a human TA, and they gave the exact same feedback.
It was basically sort of positive, neutral feedback about the speech. And the speeches were awful. They were impromptu speeches, but we gave them all positive sort of neutral feedback. The students preferred the person because they thought, "Oh, there's a person there," but they still again rated the robot very highly in terms of these positive instructional communication variables. Next month, we're conducting a study where the robot or the person gives them just scathing negative comments about their speeches, and we're going to see if they take it out on the person or do they take it on the robot. And I suspect both will be heavily judged, but the robot may be not as much because students are likely to perceive the robot as being more fair because they have this belief that machines are unbiased even though they can be incredibly biased.
And third, I think robots and AI can provide simulated social interactions. There's a lot of research in human-robot interaction or HRI that shows social robots can help people learn how to navigate difficult situations, difficult social situations, and they can have this repeated exposure. A teaching assistant's not going to want and watch the same speech 10 times. A robot simply does not care. And so it does provide a way for students to practice a lot in these uncomfortable situations. And finally, I think robots in social support or an AI can provide strong emotional support if they're programmed that way.
A few years ago, Dr. Autumn Edwards led up a study in our university library where we took like 10 robot cats and robot pets during final exam week. And we brought students into the library and we said, "Hey, just play with the robot cats and dogs for 10 minutes." After 10 minutes, stress levels were statistically reduced based on in the condition where they played with the robots. That's dramatic. And so we're working on another study using these robots called Purrbles, which are these emotional robots that sort of purr and they get warm, and as you cuddle them, they sort of calm down. It's called the anxious robot. And so we're going to tell students they're giving an impromptu speech in a large lecture in front of a couple hundred of their peers, one condition, they're going to get a Purrble to sort of relax with, and the other, they're going to get nothing.
And I suspect that those that have the social robot will have decreased anxiety. Now, at the same time, these AI virtual systems for public speaking can also have loads of bias. We know from the research that it's not a perfect system, but we're seeing it's a way as a potential. It may not replace people in terms of providing constructive feedback, but it's a great assistance to these students potentially. So what do other people think?
Jeff Child:
There's a lot of great commentary there to react to. What do you all think?
Milia Heen:
I mean, it's a lot, right? I think this idea that AI can be, and just technology can really be a way for students, especially if they don't have people in their lives at home with them to be able to practice these conversation techniques, really being able to, "This is a question I want to ask. How can I phrase it in a better way?" And things like that. So it's, the work you described is just incredible thinking about what the capabilities are and what the future is going to look like as well.
Jeff Child:
And you make some great points. You can program the supportiveness, the emotional reaction, a robot can listen to it 50 million times and not get bored right with it. So I think there are some clear advantages to doing that. I wonder, do you know, are they becoming more affordable? Because I think one impediment can be cost of getting these kinds of support.
Chad Edwards:
No, that's a great point. There are, robots we use in the lab can range five to $10,000. That's out of reach, right? Purrbles are about $60. Robot cats and dogs are about $120. And there's new systems coming out all the time that are around that thousand dollar mark. And so as these become more developed in society, we'll see the price drop dramatically. When you go to the app side and look at virtual AI systems, that price can be incredibly low as well. I mean, there are lots of free, for example, Replika, right? You can have a paid version, you can have a free version, but you can still learn to interact in certain ways. Even ChatGPT can help students. Go ask ChatGPT, "How do I respond in this situation?" Most of the time, you're going to get some decent answers, and it's at least going to be helping those students that maybe don't have access to higher levels of robots and AI as well.
Jeff Child:
Yeah, you're right, there's a wide spectrum there of ways that you can use AI and robots and technology in proactive ways. Interesting. Any other thoughts or reflections on Chad's experiments?
Nick Barr:
I mean, what fascinating work. I'm just, I've sort of, I don't think I can come up with a coherent point. I'm just thinking about the implications. And I think there are implications across so many domains, which is why we're also interested in how AI is going to change various dimensions of our social experience in society. I think we already see students using the tools that are available. So I think I would expect certainly among a large cohort of students that they will be open to using these other tools. I think there are these implications for how we structure things like assessment and evaluation, learning outcomes, but the toothpaste is out of the tube. So I think these are just things we're going to have to consider. And then certainly if there are cost-effective ways to help people reduce anxiety with the... Say the name again. Purrble?
Chad Edwards:
Purrble.
Nick Barr:
Purrble.
Milia Heen:
Purrble, okay.
Nick Barr:
Yeah, I love that. So I mean, if that can be sort of a low-cost easy intervention to help manage anxiety, I think it could be really fantastic.
Jeff Child:
Yeah, for sure. Interesting. I always love hearing about the work and reading it in our journals of what you do in your lab space with your partnerships, Chad. Thank you for sharing some of those insights on this topic with us. I just want to wrap up our session today with one final question. So we've talked about a lot of different perspectives of how we can come together from different disciplines, different perspectives in thinking about communication technologies and how we can use a variety of skills to help decrease loneliness, social isolation, and communication apprehension. And I just want to end by considering if each of you could just suggest maybe one simple strategy that an instructor might try to test out that has a big impact on getting students to open up, connect, or lessen some of their communication apprehension, what would that be? And I'll just list a very simple one.
At the beginning of my classes, I have a box of icebreaker cards. They look like a Trivial Pursuit question box, and I pull two of them out, two random ones, and presented with the class. And we spent the first 10 minutes random on all kinds of topics. If you could have a superpower, what would it be? If you could create your own holiday, what would it be? Would you rather do this or that? And just all kinds of random things. And what's interesting for me to note, I've used them for a couple of semesters, is that learning random tidbits about their peers enables them to have a better capability to connect in different ways beyond the content, the things that we're learning about in class.
And so it's been fun to see, and I never force them to answer them, but I give maybe the first five, 10 minutes of class of, "Anyone want to respond to these? What do you think?" And they enjoy it. Some of the most unlikely students come out of their shell that I wouldn't expect. So that's my suggestion is you get an icebreaker box and try just random questions to help students connect in different ways with each other.
Milia Heen:
So kind of building off of that, I try to do that at the beginning of class, again, just to get students warmed up and chatting instead of going directly to their phones. Last week I said, "Okay, I'm going to be vulnerable if I'm asking everyone else to be courageous and share. Ask me anything within reason." But it was difficult for people to come up with just a single question. So I think kind of going old school with the think, pair, share kind of process of having students working with someone else to put their brains together to come up with an answer to the icebreaker, or if they're really struggling with coming up with something on their own, having them work with someone else right from the get-go, getting them talking to someone else has really been something that's been kind of helpful. So building off of the icebreaker, starting some connection right at the beginning and going from there.
Nick Barr:
Yeah, I love these ideas. I think for me, I mostly teach in our graduate school of social works. So these are in the clinical track. So these are folks who are pursuing clinical practice education to be therapists in a lot of cases. So I think they're starting from a perspective where they're pretty comfortable talking to folks. But I do just always, regardless of what the class is, have people do group work to start. And the goal of that group work is not always to produce some group output, it's really to just have some time to talk in the group to get people, as other folks have said, warmed up. That's really the key outcome of that group work for me is a little bit of a sort of light introduction to the class environment. And I find that works much better than just starting to lecture people or do other self-directed activity.
So that's kind of my strategy. I also run a class that is a group psychotherapy class. And what we do in that class is we actually do a process group as half of the class. So 45 minutes or so of the class is a process group. If the class is big, we have one half observe. And that usually, people are very anxious about that initially. I think it's challenging for people to be on the other side, but almost every time I have that, people tell me that's the most impactful class they've had because they actually did have to be vulnerable, share, validate, and it's different doing that than it is learning about it in the abstract. So I think that deeper level of group process can be really, really helpful and maybe address some of the issues we talked about earlier in the program.
Jeff Child:
Yeah, that's great, Nick.
Chad Edwards:
Yeah, when I used to get to teach a public speaking class, it was almost always the summer and then those classes are like two hours, three hours long. I would get really bored sometimes, so I would have students speak every day. Maybe they might speak to the wall, they might speak to the phone, they might make a video for their mom, or they might speak to a partner or small groups or the entire class. But every day it was like exposure therapy. Sometimes it was really silly, like stand on one side of the fountain and talk to the class on the other side of the fountain. It's really hard, so you had to yell it.
But they got used to this idea of just talking in very diverse context. And when they gave their speeches, it seemed more comfortable, right? Because they had done it in crazy things, whereas this seemed very normal. "Oh, I'm going to give a speech to my classmates now," as opposed to yelling across to a tree. And so it seemed to work just by making it fun, but doing something every day, making every single person talk every day in some way.
Jeff Child:
I love it. One other thing that I'll share, we have a 300 level course, a junior level course that all of our students take, and it's simulation-based. So it's kind of building off of what you're talking about, Nick, where they get to, they have actors that come in and we get to test their ability to demonstrate empathy, to interact with media officials, to do some of these things where we don't often always think of those kinds of opportunities to help our students hone their skills in practical-ish kinds of situations that they'll be in. So I love that these two courses go together, the one that we talked at length about earlier, and then the simulation course where we see, what have you picked up? Can you do some of these things in a realistic kind of scenario when you have actors that are doing all kinds of things in front of you?
But thank you for joining us today. Hopefully you have all learned something that you might use to empower your own students to overcome communication apprehension, and have stronger social and emotional help overall. Thank you for listening, and tune in for the next episode of The Communication Corner.