What's Your Point?
by Elizabeth Kanabe
In our lives we continuously learn in order to better understand and function in the world. Knowledge leads to faster cars, smaller computers, novels, medicine or a quicker route to get to the grocery store. New knowledge is constantly picked up from everywhere around us. Experience, observations, books, classes and interactions with other people are all sources that contribute to our learning. When we take on the role of teacher, however informal, our level of successfully communicating depends on several key points.
Knowledge that you provide can be in the form of facts, dates, stories or ideas. We have seen too often teachers measured alone by the amount of facts that they can get a class to remember and the inefficiency in that method of teaching. Often, how we teach or explain something is overlooked, especially when what we want to teach is foremost on our minds. Without the listener understanding the "why?" and the "how?", you're usually left with a "so what?" or a misunderstanding.
The first thing to identify is what you want your audience to walk away with. Are you just telling a story? Does the story back-up a point you are making? What is the focus of your discussion or lesson? An example of missing the point has occurred when some parents teach their children to look both ways before crossing the street. It was found that some children did in fact look both ways before crossing the street, yet they continued to walk even if there were cars coming. In these instances the parents focused solely on the action of looking both ways, without actually explaining what the child was to look out for. They had assumed that the child would know, when they didn't.
In addition to focusing on the key concepts of what you want to communicate, focusing on appropriate information is a great way to reinforce the idea. It is important that examples work to help clarify the concept and are not bogged down by unnecessary details. If I am teaching someone how to change tires, it is important to tell them about safety, how to use a tire iron, how to take the tire off and replace it. It is useless for me to go on and on why I think Firestone tires are better than Michelin tires. If I am discussing the cleanliness of the cafeteria, it is useless to go on about the seasoning on the fish from last Friday.
Examples used to support a point ideally identify why the conclusion was reached, and what was different in instances where the outcome was different. Done successfully, a person will pick up on a theme in the examples and be able to apply it. When unsuccessful, the other person may be able to follow the story(s), but may not be able to identify the main lesson to apply to other situations, or will do so incorrectly. To achieve an effective result, examples must be pertinent, and the audience has to be able to relate them to the central idea.
There are also other ways to maximize what you communicate. Hands on experience, real life examples, experiments or any way to get an audience or listener involved can be useful when appropriate. For that reason teaching and communicating can require being creative to best make your point. No matter how many fireworks you set off in your communication, if the content isn't presented in a useful manner, it's only for show. The how you teach is important to get across what you are teaching.
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