University Times

For the eighth consecutive year, communication skills are ranked at the top of the list of qualities that employers find most important in job candidates, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers 2007 job outlook survey.

At the same time, the survey found employers rank communication as the skill most lacking in new college graduates.

“There is a push from outside the University for better communication skills,” said Adam Roth, coordinator for Pitt’s Communication Across the Curriculum (CxC) program.

Roth joined Pitt’s communication department last fall as a lecturer in rhetorical and communication studies with an additional responsibility for expanding CxC.

CxC sprang from 2002 Arts and Science curriculum changes aimed at strengthening writing across the curriculum by requiring that students take two writing-intensive courses, including one in the student’s major, said Patricia E. Beeson, vice provost for Graduate Studies and interim vice provost for Undergraduate Studies.

A key component of the new curriculum, Beeson said, was to take communication instruction beyond freshman writing and public speaking courses. “We had the mandate that we needed to integrate writing and speaking into the courses across the disciplines,” Beeson said. “We needed to help faculty figure out how to help students develop skills in existing classes without losing content.”

CxC at Pitt is perhaps best known for its faculty seminar, first offered in 2003 at the behest of the A&S curriculum integration committee. Beeson said Pitt drew on its strength in writing programs (a Writing Across the Curriculum program already was in place) and sought input from other experts to integrate the speaking components.

While some universities developed separate writing and speaking initiatives to address communication issues, Pitt chose to keep the two forms of communication together.

The faculty seminar is designed to help A&S faculty members incorporate more written and oral communication practice into existing courses in their disciplines.

Approximately 80 faculty members have completed the seminar and 14 new participants embarked on the eight-week program last month.

Biweekly group meetings are led by Roth and Beth Matway, who handles the writing component of the seminar. Matway, a longtime visiting lecturer in English, also chairs the College Writing Board and has been involved with the faculty seminar since its start. She has co-facilitated the sessions since spring 2004.

In addition to the group meetings, seminar participants receive $1,000 and are paired one-on-one with instructional designers from Pitt’s Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education (CIDDE) to help them redesign a selected course or revamp a major assignment within a course. The seminar is a cooperative effort of Pitt’s communication and English departments, CIDDE and A&S, and is funded by Dean for Undergraduate Studies Regina Schulte-Ladbeck.

The goal of CxC is to promote and support the teaching of oral and written communication across disciplines, said Roth, who noted there is strong interest in areas outside of A&S for similar faculty seminars.

“No matter what the discipline, communication comes into play,” Roth said. “It is a skill we have to make sure we develop in our students in all disciplines.”

Roth said he expects interest to rise as the importance of good written and oral communication skills continues to be emphasized both in academia and in the workplace.

Since his arrival, Roth has promoted and broadened CxC initiatives. A series of faculty lectures is in the planning stages. Roth and Matway jointly gave a presentation on integrating classroom speaking and writing activities at the most recent CIDDE Teaching Excellence Fair.

While Pitt’s CxC program supports faculty in improving their teaching of writing and speaking skills, which trickles down to benefit students, new additions to the program are aimed directly at students.

A new CxC guest lecture series has brought speakers in a variety of disciplines to speak to students on campus. Among them were an Alcoa attorney who spoke on communication in law and a pair of UPMC representatives who discussed health communication.

Roth also speaks to a variety of University audiences, tailoring his talk to the needs of the particular department or school that made the request. Among his recent talks has been a lecture on presenting scientific research for residents in the School of Medicine’s internal medicine program and a presentation on how to speak professionally for students in the School of Education’s Department of Health and Physical Activity.

An updated CxC web site is in the works and expected to be completed in April, Roth said. It will include resources for both students and faculty. He also hopes to further expand CxC opportunities for students by introducing short graduate-level certificate programs.

The CxC faculty seminar utilizes both a long-term and short-term strategy. In addition to the long-term goal of revising a course syllabus to include more written and oral components, the seminar also provides tips that can be implemented immediately, Roth said.

For example, he said, faculty are taught the importance of having students get into the habit of writing and speaking early in the semester and creating an atmosphere in which students feel comfortable. “I like a course when everyone participates and feels confident speaking,” he said.

Developing the simple habit of not moving too fast is another technique professors can use to encourage discussion in class. Giving students 10 seconds to respond to questions and not moving on so quickly makes a difference, Roth said. “Generally, someone’s willing to answer.”

Another technique that has been found to encourage students to speak up in class involves handing out discussion questions and giving the students a chance to write down their thoughts and confer with classmates before the professor brings the class back together for discussion. “No one gets called on on the spot,” Roth said, reducing the intimidation that might inhibit a student from sharing his or her ideas.

Hannah Johnson, an assistant professor in English, participated in the fall faculty seminar. Although the changes she made to the assignment she’d selected for her seminar project won’t be incorporated into her syllabus until fall, she already has implemented a number of other new practices in her medieval literature classes.

Johnson said she has designed more rubrics for students to enable them to better understand her expectations and evaluate their own performance on papers and oral presentations. “It gives them more concrete guidelines to go by,” she said.

For one class, Johnson has compiled a list of questions to guide students in preparing for a large oral presentation assignment. “I always tried to write very explicit instructions, but breaking them down into categories and giving them concrete suggestions enables students to visualize the work more clearly,” she said. She already has noticed that her students appear more confident in approaching such assignments.

In another class, she has divided students into discussion groups and asks them to post responses on Blackboard to a question she posts for them. Postings count as 15 percent of students’ grade. By giving examples of what is expected, including providing samples of exceptional postings by prior students, “I’ve definitely seen a stronger start with these students.”

A newcomer to Pitt last fall, Johnson had taken advantage of intensive instructor training programs in her prior teaching at Princeton University. “The seminar helped me build on that knowledge,” she said, adding she felt fortunate to be able to participate in the seminar in her first semester as a Pitt faculty member.

“It was a great way to get started at Pitt,” she said. “I came away with a bank of examples, sample assignments and articles,” to keep on file as she prepares for future courses, she said.

In addition, she said she was impressed by the range of disciplines represented by her fellow participants. “It was beneficial to hear ideas from a range of disciplinary perspectives,” Johnson said. She adapted a math professor’s idea — to have students design and submit questions that would comprise their first test — for her own class, adding that her students had to think about the subject matter in a new way in order to create the questions. “That idea I thought was really great,” she said.

Johnson also has enjoyed utilizing CIDDE resources. “It’s wonderful just to be able to go and bounce ideas off someone” as she pondered her course planning with her assigned instructional designer.

Roth also practices what he preaches. He incorporates a service learning component into his special topics course on communication in business, professional and workplace environments by assigning students a real-world writing project for a nonprofit organization. Last semester, his students were given a topic and asked to research and write an article for the National Aviary. One article was selected and the co-authors got a byline in the aviary’s Bird Calls magazine.

“It was a great experience for them,” he said.

Faculty interest is growing thanks to a combination of word-of-mouth as well as Roth’s efforts to promote CxC, said CIDDE associate director Joanne Nicoll. She said Roth has been making the rounds in A&S to encourage participation.

In comparison with this semester’s cohort of 14 participants, 10 faculty members completed the program last fall, five participated in fall 2005 and six in spring 2006.

Roth said he is planning a reunion for CxC seminar graduates to give those who have completed the program a chance to network with other participants and to share how they’ve incorporated CxC into their courses.

While not every faculty member can take the seminar — Roth noted 30 faculty members applied for the 14 spots in the current seminar — all faculty can get help in adding oral and written components to their courses, he stressed. He and Matway will meet individually with interested faculty, and CIDDE instructional designers are available to all faculty by appointment.

Faculty also can apply to participate in future seminars, he said.

“When department chairs know about this and the value of it, they get that message to the faculty,” Nicoll said. “People learn about it and then they’re interested in doing it because it’s so successful.”

Offering the faculty seminar over an entire semester gives professors the chance to discuss the changes they’re making in their classes and to work step-by-step, as needed, with an instructional designer.

“The continued support makes changes in faculty’s teaching,” Nicoll said, noting that efforts are underway to quantify the impact on student learning.

“We feel that this is an excellent professional development model to use,” she said, noting that CIDDE is searching for a good assessment strategy in addition to the feedback solicited from faculty participants on what they changed in their classes and what techniques are working.

“We’d like to look at learning changes in students,” Nicoll said. “When we change faculty’s teaching behavior to be more effective in speaking and writing, we believe student learning is going to be increased.”

—Kimberly K. Barlow