Appreciative coaching for student academic and professional development

Negative self-talk and appraisals of self-efficacy can damage students’ abilities to do well in college and lead to self-fulfilling prophesies where students fail to meet their academic and professional potentials. This multi-class activity uses appreciative coaching to help students utilize a positive mindset and achieve academic and professional goals. This coaching model, based on the tenets of appreciative inquiry, begins with a topic selection and then progresses through four stages: discover, dream, design, and destiny. The coaching process can assist instructors and students in focusing on the positive aspects of student performance, increase self-confidence, motivation to do well in courses, and proactive career planning, and create a positive learning environment.

Courses: Business Communication, Freshman Seminar, Professional Development, Senior Capstone

Objectives: The objectives of this activity are for students to (1) practice positive reframing, (2) appraise and identify their strengths and skills, (3) select goals, (4) create action plans to reach goals, and (5) be empowered and take responsibility for their academic and professional progress.     

Using initial,derived, and terminal credibility to help students understand how they are perceived by others

Courses: Public Speaking, Interpersonal Communication, Organizational Communication, Introduction to Communication Studies, Business Communication

Objectives: The goal for this activity is not only to provide students with an understanding of their initial, derived, and terminal credibility when relating a personal, edifying story but also to understand how they are initially perceived by their fellow students.     

COMS Day as a communication senior capstone team project

Courses: Senior Seminar

Objectives: (1) To provide graduating students a semester-long capstone experience where they can apply communication theories/skills in a professional context. (2) To create a capstone project that contributes to programmatic assessment.     

Making a difference: A community-based campaign that promotes diversity and inclusion

Courses: This semester-long project is suited for courses on persuasion, diversity, social media, communication and technology, social advocacy, service-learning, or social justice.

Objective: This assignment challenges students to research, design, launch, maintain, and assess an anti-hate social media campaign.     

Enhancing negotiation skills using foreign service simulations

Courses: Conflict communication, negotiation, small group

Objective: This activity will enhance students’ awareness and critique of their own negotiation behaviors.     

Amazing race: Finding and correctly citing credible sources

Courses: Public Speaking and courses familiarizing students with finding/citing sources.

Objective(s): After completing the activity, students will understand how to find and cite information in print, online, and personal communication formats.     

Stunning statistics for persuasive speaking

Courses: Advanced Public Speaking, Argumentation Theory

Objectives: This activity aims to enhance students’ ability to make statistics compelling and persuasive.     

Developing Online Tutorials to Improve Information Literacy Skills for Second-Year Nursing Students of University College Dublin

This article explores the process of developing online tutorials for a specified student group, in this case Second-Year Nursing students in University College Dublin. The product was commissioned by the Health Sciences Library and the UCD School of Nursing, Midwifery, and Health Systems. It was developed as a “Capstone Project” for part fulfillment of the MLIS in UCD.

We focused our research on three areas of scholarship to assist in the development of our product, namely Information Behavior, Learning Technologies, and Learning Science and Design. Flemings VARK model was used to inform the team of the four different learning styles (visual, auditory, reading, and kinesthetic) and to match the presentation style to these.

An initial difficulty in the assessment phase was one of access to a large group of students, as the students were on clinical placements. We created personas and a profile of nursing students to try and compensate for this. The tutorial was developed to cater for this specific group of students and later to act as a valuable support to the Library, which is under severe pressure in terms of staff availability to support student learning.

The product is relatively straightforward to produce (and maintain) and is something the Library will be able to develop and add to in future years.     

Teaching audience adaptation using connected presentations and teamwork

Courses: Introduction to Communication, Public Speaking, Persuasion, Business Communication.

Objective: This activity increases students’ understanding of audience adaptation and improves their ability to adapt presentations to specific audiences.     

The Zen Scavenger Hunt: Constructing and presenting persuasive messages

Courses: Persuasion; Persuasive Speaking

Objectives: Students will demonstrate the ability to apply persuasive concepts in constructing persuasive messages creatively, and students will present and analyze their persuasive messages.     

Utilizing elements of The Apprentice in the strategic communication campaigns course

Courses: Strategic Campaigns, Advertising/Public Relations Campaigns

Objectives: The purpose of this semester-long project is student application of research-based strategic communication strategies and techniques used in executing a professional strategic communication campaign for a client.     

Rube Goldberg salad system: Teaching systems theory in communication

Courses: Undergraduate Organizational Communication, Communication Theory, and Small Group Communication courses.

Objectives: This single-class activity aims to engage students actively in explaining and applying systems components, processes, and properties.     

Food as social justice: Critical ethnography as a lens for communication activism

Courses: Public Speaking.

Objectives: This semester-long service-learning activity examines access to affordable healthy food as a social justice issue, using critical ethnography as a framework to help students understand the link between activism and public speaking skills. After completing the project, students will be able to: (1) develop a narrative speech that links their respective identities to food justice; (2) adapt a persuasive message that connects a community partner's food justice goals to a target audience; and (3) communicate ethically with a public while participating in a food justice campaign.     

Narrative learning using podcasts in interpersonal communication

Course: Interpersonal Communication

Objective: This semester-long approach utilizes weekly podcasts to engage students in narrative learning. Students evaluate podcast narratives and apply interpersonal communication concepts and theories through structured and unstructured learning activities.     

Using the outdoor scavenger hunt to teach theories of organizational communication

Courses: Communication Theory, Organizational Communication, Strategic Communication.

Objectives: Students will identify and categorize organizational discourses on their campuses; students will become aware of the ethical considerations of communication; students will recognize the different perceptions of organizational culture on campus.     

To watch or to read? The respective influence of televised political debates and media debate coverage on citizen learning

Courses: Media and Politics, Political Communication, Political Rhetoric, Media Effects.

Objective: By taking part in a classroom activity, students will explore how cognitive frames and media frames play a role in learning from political debates.     

Ally,Advocate, Activist: Semester-long civic engagement in the basic communication course

Courses: Basic communication course.

Objectives: Using the Ally, Advocate, Activist framework in a basic communication course will help students apply course concepts to their lives and communities. This framework helps students practice civic engagement while mastering the skills that are typically tested for assessment purposes in the basic communication course.     

Teaching communication and conflict as a game

Courses: Communication and Conflict.

Objectives: Through the use of a game-based framework, students will build intrinsic motivation to engage with course material and course content, and will engage their critical-thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills in relation to conflict management over the length of the course.     

Social media listening and Title IX training crisis: Implications for discourse of renewal

Courses: Undergraduate or graduate organizational/crisis communication or public relations courses

Objective: The goal for this single class activity is for students to apply discourse of renewal to an organizational crisis fueled through social media.     

Teaching ethos from the dumpster: Dive and food waste rhetoric

Courses: Rhetorical Criticism, Composition, Environmental Communication

Objectives: This unit activity, for which students view a documentary to identify and evaluate persuasive ethos and then create their own rhetorical messages for reducing food waste, serves as a platform for teaching both the critique and practice of rhetoric, as well as familiarizing students with the complexities of the global food system and food waste.