What is your communication style?

Shown at the board is SLP Deb Browne.

Photo by Lara Mazzone.

Students in several social-pragmatic language groups brainstormed and identified their “communication styles” recently.

This activity helps students begin to see their behaviors from the outside, as others see them.

Each student either underlined or a drew a symbol by descriptors for the various ways they communicate and received careful feedback from Speech-Language Pathologists and other students.

Styles suggested ranged from more positive styles like open, honest, playful on the left, to the more negative styles of gruff, argumentative, and rigid on the right side. Guess which words represent your child’s style?

During group and individual sessions, we discussed what situations bring out the best and worst in us as well as what styles we like to be around. The activity lays a fun foundation for understanding the “impression making” concepts. Through impression-making work, students realize the “ongoing idea of them” in other people’s minds, and how the impressions get created by what they say, what they do, and how they look. This provides internal motivation for many behaviors we want to develop.

Goals related to impression making and perspective taking are part of the Brehm Speech-Language Department’s use of the “social thinking” curriculum developed by SLP Michelle Winner.

A typed list was provided as an accommodation for those with visual processing difficulties who might find the colorful writing too chaotic.