Managerial Communication: content and development

Hello Everyone:

I hope this post finds you all well and surviving the semster!

This is a long overdue blog about a recent brainstorming conversation Suzanne, Linda, and I had about 3068. My hope is to share some of my recollections of our conversation and then, Suzanne and Linda please chime in . . .

Bob and Jana, we met in March to continue discussions about the philosophy and goals of 3068 as well as just to ‘compare notes’ and share ideas. Although we haven’t been able to meet again lately, we hope to continue this dialogue.

Part of our conversation was a discussion of the various backgrounds we all bring to our teaching of 3068.

Our backgrounds span the fields of organizational communication (coming from the communication studies discipline), management communication (coming more from management studies), and business communication (a combination of communication studies, management, and english, and others). And, because of this, we all come at the class in ways that are both similar and different.

One way we came to this realization was through a comparison of teaching materials. For example, I use the Miller book, partly because it is written by an organizational communication studies scholar and reflects what i know. Suzanne has used other books in the past, but has been experimenting with Miller as well. Linda’s background and expertise draws her to Argenti’s text, particularly its case study focus and inclusion of crisis communication (one of her specialties).

We have also compared TOCs – there is a great deal of topical overlap between these texts; there are also differences with respect to the theoretical ideas being presented and history of ‘the field’ (as they vary) being presented. We all see strengths in both of these resources.

Yet we also talked about the need to reduce overlap between 3068 and, for example, 3102 as well as the pre-req management classes that are a part of the program. We also talked about the need to continue to develop a course that fully brought together a focus on *communication* with respect to management and organizing. What makes this class different, unique, and/or special in relation to other classes which may also talk about issues of leadership, conflict, etc. in the workplace?

I am putting up (as soon as I send this) a ‘working’ draft of a course philosophy emerging out of these conversations. The goal of this philosophy is for us to come together on some broad goals we want to accomplish in 3068, understanding that we may (probably will) get to these goals differently. Yet they give us some place to start. Please get on to the blog and comment, edit, revise, etc. I’m just putting up a first draft with the expectation that we’ll all add our thoughts in the coming weeks.

We all decided to share ideas via this blog, although we recognize that time is scarce these days. Linda noted that her case study approach is ‘emergent’ by nature but there may be ways for her to help teach Suzanne and I more about doing case studies in the classroom.

I think this is the jist of what I remember from our conversation. Suzanne and Linda, please add in your thoughts. Although time is scare to meet, our hope is that this blog will allow us to interact and continue to share ideas on 3068.

Have a super weekend.

Caryn

So I hear that Jana is back with us and that Linda Lopez and Bob Myers have joined The COM3068 blog. I thought I would take a moment to welcome both Jana back to work and Bob and Linda to the blog and reiterate a few points about the blog and how it might function as a point of reference and discussion about the Managerial Communication course, COM3068.

At this point there are 6 of us connected to this blog. Caryn, Linda, myself, Kevin Wolf (Instructional Technologist), Jana and Bob.  All of us can post, edit and upload documents or other media to this blog. I invite anyone to post their thoughts and reflections on the COM3068 course or just about theories and concepts related to managerial communication in general, or even on teaching and learning.

At this point in time the blog is closed and can only be seen by the six of us. Though I would like to open it to the larger Baruch community I will keep it closed until the general consensus is ready to have it open for others to visit and in return for us to have Feeds and information from other faculty blogs here at Baruch. One issue was that there might be sensitive material or even exams and quizzes that students might be able to see if the blog were no longer password protected. However, for future reference we can password protect various elements or reference pages of the blog and have the rest of the blog open.  This is all for further discussion.

For the moment I want to draw your attention to the right hand upper corner on the blog where it is marked pages. Each one of the Pages are evolving reference spaces where we can go to retrieve information and documents to help teach or research various elements of the COM3068 course. Anyone of us can add to those Pages and or create a new page. All one needs to do is go to Site Admin all the way on the bottom right of the blog home page and click on it. Then put in your password, the one you used when you signed on as  a member of this blog. You will then have the possibility to click on Write a Post or Page. The rest is basically like writing a word document, to add an image or a document there is a small Add Media button on top of the text box. Click on this and jut follow the directions. If anyone has any problems just give me a call.

That’s about all I have to say for now, I am hoping that this is more of an open discussion blog and that it is not me and my direction alone that will guide the use of this blog as a reference for the development of the COM3068 course. Because if it is….We’re in big trouble…:)

So I gave the last class today and I am feeling some mixed emotions about the course this year and mainly my teaching of it. I had a discussion with the students as to how the course was organized and what choice of content was used.

I organized the course in 3 main components, the first being rhetoric and how society has viewed work and labor through the ages and how that relates to today’s globalized workplace. The students then had to write a paper in relation to these concepts and the readings in the course. I wrote an earlier post on this part of the course.  This was a very successful part of the course and the students all agreed during today’s discussion that it was an interesting way to have an over view of the course material to come, and to think about organizations, work and labor as a whole.

The second part of the course was the different theories in organizational communication. I stuck very much to the textbook and went over chapters and lead discussions on examples of the theory in real life situations as well as having the students reading articles and case studies. The students then wrote a 5 page paper applying one of the theories to a case study or an observation in their own organization. I am not fully satisfied with  the way in which I taught and organized this particular component to the course.

The students seemed to like the general way in which the course  went over each theory by itself and then tried to apply it through case studies and articles. But they felt there was way too much theory and that they were overwhelmed at the end. This was demonstrated in an almost 70% failure rate on the mid term quiz.

I would like to rethink this 2nd part of the course and try to make it more functional to the course and the students.

The third and last component was ‘People’; emotion, diversity and the individual in the workplace. I followed some of Caryn’s guidelines for this final part pf the course. The students were very interested and I had  some up-to-date research articles which really worked well, ( I have put them in the reading resources pages). I would have liked to delve more into this area and I think the class would have benefited. However there was not enough time and I am thinking of ways to introduce this component earlier in the semester. But in truth there is never enough time. I also think I should have had  a paper that related to this particular area of content. I had the students do an expanded version of the 2nd paper. but I think now it would have worked better to do another 5 page paper on the third and last content component of the course.

So, I now want to advocate for fewer theories and will seek input from the other Managerial Communication faculty to see which theories are considered to be fundamental to Organizational Communication and which can be left for “Further Reading.”  I also want to examine the quizzes and exams; how can they be easier for the students to learn form as well as standards from which to evaluate the course direction.

I liked teaching this course and I like many of the changes we implemented for this pilot semester. I really continue to advocate for the rhetoric component; I think it starts off the course with a much more conceptual look at the content and the subject matter and I believe it helps the student move into a more academic-critical thinking mode from the very beginning of the semester.

The students were generally very pleased with the course, and I received a round of applause when I told them that I was expecting to see all of them in 5-10 years inviting us -COM3068 faculty-to the companies or political campaigns they have created to give talks and seminars. You see, I am getting some future work for us all.