Classroom Exercises in Communication

Communication skills help students form relationships, negotiate conflicts and form well-reasoned opinions.

Learning good communication skills is not only an end in itself, but a means to other forms of education. On a basic level, speaking, listening and interpreting skills help students form relationships, negotiate conflicts and form well-reasoned opinions. Communication skills can also help us understand advanced and difficult concepts, ask questions that will help give us the information we need, solve problems as groups and share our knowledge with our peers.

Guess My Audience

"Guess My Audience" is an activity that challenges students to develop both their public speaking skills and their ability to listen for contextual clues. Give each group of students a particular topic and an audience to prepare a speech for, as well as a short time limit such as five minutes for the speech. For example, the topic could be a persuasive speech trying to convince the audience to adopt a healthy diet or an informative speech about the parts of a flower. The audience could be 25 mostly male college students in a typical classroom, or 30 retirees split evenly between males and females, at a community activity night or some other group event. The class will design their speeches and take turns giving them to other students, who will have a chance to guess to whom the speech was given. The class can then discuss how the sex, age, number, background and other factors about the group affected their speeches.

20 Questions: Open and Closed

"20 Questions: Open and Closed" is a game that helps students learn the difference between open and closed questions. It is also a great icebreaker for the classroom. Before the class, write the names of well-known sports, political, cultural and fictional characters on note cards and tape one to each student's back. The students then play a round of the game, where each can only ask simple "yes or no" closed questions to find out who the character on his back is. Then, give everyone a different card and play a second round where each student can ask open, non-"yes or no" questions about the character.

Dinner Party

"Dinner Party" is almost the opposite of "20 Questions: Open and Closed." In this game, one person plays the host of a dinner party. Each person is a character such as a cowboy, the world's luckiest man or a historical character the class has studied. The host welcomes the characters one at a time to his imaginary party and interacts with them, trying to guess which each is. Alternately, give everyone in the class a character to play. Have them interact with each other while carrying around a piece of paper. Each student has to write down as many of the secret identities of his classmates as he can in five minutes.

Mirror Mirror

Different people may show the same emotion in different ways. "Mirror Mirror" is a communication exercise that allows students to explore how emotions look on different faces. The class divides into two equal groups, who form into an inner circle and an outer circle facing each other. The teacher calls out an emotion such as "anger" and each member of the inner circle makes a face that shows that emotion. Then, the outer circle people make a face back showing the same emotion. The outer circle then shifts one partner over and continues the activity with a new emotion.

References

• ISU Comm: Classroom Oral Communication Activities
• Winona State University Communication Studies Basic Course: Selected Student Generated Ice Breakers