Effective Communication Behaviors

In thinking about someone who I admire, model from and learn from each day is my friend Sara.  This year I moved to a new school teaching preschool children with disabilities and she has become a dear friend to me as we work closely together.   Sara is the Occupational Therapist and is the kindest, most compassionate person I know, and seems to always say and respond so elegantly to the parents we meet with.  She can take a difficult situation and word it in a way that is honest, constructive, and thinks from the point of view of the child.  Sara always reminds me that I need to “tap in.”  Tap into the way they learn….by feeling (sensory), visualizing, and looking steps ahead.  I’ll never forget the day we had several children to screen as parents were concerned about their child’s development.  One parent came and completely cried on my shoulder as she didn’t know what else to do to help her child and respectively told me that she “didn’t want to go down this path again” as her other son also had a disability.  As Sara and I talked with mom, I just sat back and watched Sara calm this mother down and devised a plan for next steps and seemed to ask the perfect questions that targeted why mom was frustrated.  We must continue to advocate truthfulness, accuracy, honesty and reason as essential to the integrity of communication (O’Hair & Wiemann, 2012).

References

     O'Hair, D., & Wiemann, M. (2012). Real communication: An introduction. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's.