How to Teach Confident Communicators

Vicki Davis: (00:01) They told us these platforms would connect us, and here we are, lonelier than ever. Our guest today, Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk, calls that the technological bluff, and he says that the antidote isn’t another app. It’s something we’ve had all along — the way we carry our own body. Stick around, because this one will change how you walk into your classroom tomorrow and how you teach emotional intelligence to your students.

Announcer: (00:31) This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis: (00:35) Today we’re talking with Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk. He’s head of school in Wisconsin. He holds a PhD in rhetoric and hosts the remarkable Mind For Life podcast. His research focuses on media ecology — that’s the study of how our communication technologies shape the way we think, relate, and learn.

And we’re going to talk about communication and education, understanding the media around us, maybe a little bit of AI, as we often talk about. But Jeff, it’s really interesting. Communication in this age of loneliness, miscommunication, and division — this is a topic that’s resonating with people, isn’t it?

Jeff Bogaczyk: (01:24) Yeah, just to address that, there was a French sociologist, Jacques Ellul, who wrote a book a while back called The Technological Bluff. And his basic interpretation of society was that we need to now look through the lens of technique and technology as we look into society.

And basically, the technological bluff was about what technology promises humanity in order to advance itself. I don’t know if you remember, when back when the social media platforms were all coming out — and these are going to connect us better to human beings, these platforms are going to allow us to interact with other people and facilitate better human connections.

That was a false truth. It was a lie. And here we are, more segmented in society than ever before, people disconnected, as you mentioned, epidemics of loneliness, all as a result of these platforms. They are not bringing us together. They are distancing us. They are pitting one against the other. And it’s an unfortunate situation.

But quite honestly, the money was worth it for them. And people will do and say whatever they have to do in order to be able to advance whatever their projects are and cash in on it. And that’s what we see going on. Similar, I would say, Elon Musk, with the promises of robotics, and nobody’s ever going to have to work, and everybody’s going to have free income, and everybody’s going to be driven around by cars and robots. Is that really the world we want to live in? Because work does have a meaningful purpose in our life. We want to be able to do something that’s purposeful, and working with people and being in relationships. I don’t trust those guys, to be quite honest with you.

Vicki Davis: (03:01) Well, it’s a saying — fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I was in the cell phone business, and how do we market cell phones? We learned that one reason back in the early ’90s that people would buy cell phones — that was for the safety of their children. Did phones make them safer? No. Social media, did it make us more socially connected? No, it made us lonelier.

This is one thing I teach my students: you have to be careful of the marketing line. Because AI, for example — is it processing? Is it doing data analytics? No, it says it’s thinking. It’s not thinking. It’s processing. It’s doing algorithms. And I asked them, hey, would you have used this if it said “algorithmically calculating” whatever? They said no. I said, but how about when it says “thinking”? So they’ve intentionally anthropomorphized AI to make it think that it’s like a human brain, which it’s not.

Now, there’s some great uses of AI. This is a really prevalent marketing technique of technology companies — to tell us it’s going to make our lives better. Oh, don’t be afraid.

Jeff Bogaczyk: (03:59) It’s interesting you say that, because there is a — I would say a foundational basis for interpretation of how people think of the human brain. People think of the human brain as a computer. That metaphor then extends to what computers do — that all the brain does is process information. And we know that it’s more than that.

The brain is connected to our bodies. It is connected to our nervous systems. The brain allows us to perceive the world in ways completely different because of its connections to our body, that computers can never do. And so people with that interpretation, or that foundational interpretation of how the brain works, extend it to machines.

And I think there’s just a fundamental difference. We’re not machines. We are creations. We are bodies. And there is something very unique and distinct about that — quite different qualitatively, you might say it, from computers and robots and everything that they’re creating to try to mimic or recreate the human.

Vicki Davis: (05:02) So one thing I always tell my students is, in the age of AI, emotional intelligence of us humans is far more important. I always encourage them. We do activities to learn to read the body language of the other people, because they tend to want to look at the screen. And when they look at the screen, everybody around them looks at the screen. They’re not making eye contact. They’re not understanding, you know, what we’re communicating.

And you’re all about communication. Now, you’ve got a 30-day challenge on your Instagram that by the time we air this may be all the way through, but I encourage people to go listen to it. And you had some really interesting statistics you shared about somebody tapping out what they thought was a rhythm. Could you share that study with us? Because it just really resonated with me.

Jeff Bogaczyk: (05:51) The issue is the curse of knowledge. And everybody has internal knowledge of certain things that we often think other people have as well, but they don’t. As the example you’re referring to in that study — it was a 1990 study at Stanford where somebody who knew a song, say for example “Happy Birthday to You,” would just tap out the rhythm, “Happy Birthday to You,” of that song and thought, oh, it’s so easy. Because when you’re tapping out the song, you’re singing along in your own brain the melody, because you know the song. And so that knowledge that we have internally of the song, we just think, oh, everybody else possesses that.

They don’t. They’re not hearing the melody of “Happy Birthday to You” or “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or anything like that. All they’re hearing is taps in some type of rhythmic sequence. Without the internal knowledge, it’s very difficult for other people to understand what’s going on in our minds.

I think it’s part of — you know, as human beings, we’ve got a couple of problems. Number one, we think other people can read our minds. Like, you should just know what I’m thinking, and all of my past experiences, past knowledge, and past history. Additionally, we think we can read other people’s minds. And so that comes back to emotional intelligence — that we think people see our emotions and know our emotional states and can recognize those things, when they don’t. We often fail to recognize that we don’t understand other people’s emotional states.

And emotional intelligence — which I think is wonderful, and how you talk to your students about that, I think it’s incredible. That’s such a key quality to be able to understand. We’re more than just, again, information beings. We are emotional beings, and that emotion comes through in all of that.

So that knowledge goes back to — you know, one of the other things I talk about in this 30-day challenge is that illusion of transparency. We just assume that other people know what’s going on in our minds, and they don’t. And so that’s why communication is so critical — asking questions to actually hear what somebody else is feeling or what they’re going through, and then communicating the knowledge that we have. Because we just have the expectation that you’re going to get it. You should know this. You should get it. Well, they don’t. They can’t read your mind. They don’t know what you’re thinking. And so being clear in how you communicate really does help to solve some of those things that prevent us from connecting with one another.

Vicki Davis: (08:32) So Jeff, you’re a head of school. How do you take this to your teachers? Because so often what we think we’ve communicated to our students — we have an eye-opening moment where we realize, what I think I just said, they didn’t understand what I said. They understood something totally different. Especially middle school. They kind of have so much going on so often. And it’s like, I didn’t say that at all. How do you help your teachers with this?

Jeff Bogaczyk: (08:58) What we try to do — it’s not easy. These are obstacles for communication that we deal with quite regularly and often.

But we encourage our teachers to communicate out often and in multiple ways — through, you might want to say it, multiple media — the expectations and what’s coming. And then to write it on the board, to write it in the software system that people are looking at, to communicate it to students verbally. Just communicating out the expectations over and over again.

And we do that from a leadership perspective as well, communicating out what we expect and what our vision and what our mission is. Somebody said this before, and I don’t know who, actually, but it does make sense: the moment you’re sick of saying it, that’s the moment they’re finally starting to actually hear it. It just needs to be communicated over and over.

And for us, one of our expected student outcomes, which is a part of our portrait of a graduate, is confident communicators. We want to — through our school, through our curriculum, through our environment — produce students who are confident communicators. They can speak well. They can write well. They can think well. Thinking, to me, is a communication event — that intrapersonal communication. You’re having a dialogue with yourself when you’re thinking.

For our students, that they can negotiate the most important relationships in their life. And the way we do that is through communication. There is no relationship without communication. Communication is — you might even say it — is the relationship.

Vicki Davis: (10:38) We’ve been talking with Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk. He has the Mind For Life podcast. He’s all over social media. And there’s so much we could talk about — and hey, we didn’t even get a chance to talk about AI today. That’ll have to be another conversation, about how technology has changed how we communicate. But you know, here’s the thing.

In the age of AI, the humans that will be successful are the humans who have the emotional intelligence, the communication skills. I love your profile of a graduate, because it’s so important to be able to communicate effectively — whether it’s like we are, online, or especially face-to-face — just so we can have those good, healthy relationships, so that we can reduce loneliness. If we could move from social media to just being social human beings, we would have a better world, wouldn’t we, Jeff?

Jeff Bogaczyk: (11:30) I think we would. Depends on how you would define “better.” I think both you and I would define it differently than some of the people that are advancing these platforms and pushing these technologies on us. So more humanistic, if we can say it that way — not in the secular humanistic way, but just in the fact that we are connected better at the human level, which is an important thing.

Vicki Davis: (11:53) So Jeff, thank you for coming on the show, and thanks for all that you’re sharing. Mind For Life is a really great resource for all of us.

Jeff Bogaczyk: (12:01) Vicki, it’s been a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me. I’ve enjoyed it, and we definitely have to do it again.

Vicki Davis: (12:08) Thanks for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Watch the video version of this podcast and catch my new radio and TV show, Cool Cat Teacher Talk, on YouTube and a radio or TV station near you. Join my Cool Cat Teacher Classroom Matters newsletter at coolcatteacher.com/newsletter. Leave a review if you found this helpful. See you later, educator.