OBSERVING COMMUNICATION

Observation is a powerful way of learning. I believe this is the reason behind schools organizing peer observation for teachers as being done in my school. The idea is to pick good practices and look for information that can be of use and help to both the observed and the one observing. Through this practice new behavior and practices are noticed and learned. However, observation does not mean imitation per se as the behavior seen exhibited does not necessarily have to be duplicated.

As part of the requirements for this week’s assignment, I spent some hours observing a child, her parents and health workers communicating at a hospital I visited yesterday.

Children are powerful communicators and depend a lot on communication for expressing their needs and for learning. I realized as soon as the little girl and her mom entered into the waiting room where I was already seated that the girl was calm, careful and conscious of the environment. Her response to my greetings was by nodding her head and signaling to me that I should be quiet. Her response to the nurse’s attempt at getting some needed information from her was in the same way, the mother had to answer the enquiries of the nurse herself even in some instances that the little girl’s answer could have been more appropriate and highly essential.

It was apparent that the little girl must have told that ‘you do not make a noise at the hospital and that the hospital is a special place’ which explains her strange behavior and her unusual quietness (as I learned from the mum later). Communicating with children needs to be detailed, clear and positive. It is better more time is spent telling them what to do and less time telling them what not to do. Like in this scenario instead of telling the girl “No talking in the hospital” a statement such as “It is expected that one talks softly in the hospital so as not to disturb other patients” could have been well understood by any child and serve the intended purpose.

Communication is unarguably fundamental to human interaction and relationship. It is a two-way process that involves sending, receiving and decoding messages. For children, just as the message been sent is important and must be the right one it is equally important that effort is made especially by adults that the message is been sent in a way that the child correctly understand, receive, and interpret the message sent for it to be effective.