Running head: ENHANCING TEACHING TOWARD HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS

Enhancing Teaching Toward Hard of Hearing Students

Jordan Quinn
Sydnee Church Hansen
Hiba Kamal
Puspa Gautam
Nicholas Holt
Salt Lake Community College

ENHANCING TEACHING TOWARD HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS

Enhancing Teaching Toward Hard of Hearing Students

With college attendance increasing every year we find that we are in need of professors
to teach these students. As the attendance increases, we find that we have a larger and wider
variety of students in colleges. With this much variety in the student body, we will soon realize
that some of these students have things they struggle with, or hidden disabilities. To be more
specific some of these students may have a hearing loss. A lot of students do not discuss their
hearing loss and as college professors; we should do everything we can to let students know we
are here to help in anyway. The first thing we can do is to enhance our teaching abilities to tackle
this head on without even knowing if we have a student with hearing loss.
Purpose / Objective
The purpose of this communications campaign is to create a seminar to teach professors
how to identify and effectively teach students who are hard of hearing. Because of the fairly
large number of actual students at SLCC who are hard of hearing and find it uncomfortable to
address this with their professors, this campaign will target professors before the semester
beginsduring their required training period. This will be done through a variety of channels
and media that effectively reach this target audience. It is this teams goal that in conducting this
communications campaign, professors will be able to identify the difficulty of some of their
students in understanding them, and therefore, make adjustments in their teaching to better the
quality of their lessons

ENHANCING TEACHING TOWARD HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS

Audience
The target audience for this communication campaign is full time and adjunct professors at Salt
Lake Community College (SLCC). Below is a demographic and psychographic profile of this
audience:
Demographics
43% white male, 35% white female, 6% Black, 5% Hispanic, 10% Asian/Pacific
Islander (Race/Ethnicity of college faculty, 2013)
53% of Professors at SLCC are males; 47% are females.
There is a Faculty-to-student ratio of 1:20 (Salt Lake Community College, 2014).
The Full-time Equivalent Faculty is 878.5 (Salt Lake Community College, 2014).
58.1% of Instruction is Taught by Part-time Faculty (Salt Lake Community College,
2014).
90% of Professors at SLCC have a Bachelors Degree or higher (Salt Lake
Community College, 2014).

Psychographics
Out of the 858 professors who filled out a survey, over 80% said they wanted to
teach because they enjoyed working with young people. This was followed by
75% of teachers who said they wanted to make a difference (Marsh, 2015).
A good professor knows that teaching is about listening, questioning, being
responsive, and remembering that each student and class is different (Leblanc,
1999).

ENHANCING TEACHING TOWARD HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS

Audience Analysis
This audience is very well educated, 90% of instructors and professors have a bachelors,
masters, or doctoral degree in their field. Higher educational levels mean they are highly
qualified to teach and interact with students. With such a wide mix of cultures, backgrounds,
languages, and personal experiences among the college faculty, (whether they are from the U.S.
or from foreign countries), it can be both advantage and disadvantage. While some students can
benefit from this, it may be difficult for students with hearing problems to understand their
professor due to a foreign accent. In addition, there are different teaching methods used in
various countries which will affect the way the student is receiving the information. However, it
is impressive how the college faculty accepts feedback, new ideas, and suggestions from their
students and is always open to improving their ways of teaching. This will be very helpful since
the teams goal is to give them better understanding to enhance their teaching towards students
with difficulty hearing.
Messaging Goals
Given the purpose and objective of this campaign, and the demographic and
psychographic profile of the target audience, this team has set the following messaging goals:
Think
Understand that there are students in my class that are struggling to hear/
understand me.
Understand the necessity of a clear presentation.
Feel
Knowing my students better will enhance my teaching

ENHANCING TEACHING TOWARD HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS

By being more visual in my teaching I can reach out to all of my students

Do
Implement a Get to Know You quiz at the beginning of the semester
Avoid the amount of time spent talking to the whiteboard and spend more time
talking towards the class.
Repeat answers given by students so that all can understand and participate.
Key Messages
Its not always necessary that everyone in a target audience remembers every single
message in a communications campaign. However, the team wants their audience to retain these
four key messages:
Implementing these simple strategies can help me better know my students.
Im in control of my teaching methods and classroom environment, because of
this I will help students with difficulty hearing succeed.
Not all students feel comfortable with coming up to me about their personal
struggles.
I can make a difference in my students lives.
Style Guide
A cohesive design style is essential to a successful communications campaign. It allows
for the audience to know exactly what is part of a specific campaign and differentiate it from
others. For our style guide we tried to match SLCCs design style they used on their website. To
do this we took the blues and golds from the site and the logo and created a style guide for our
various media channels.

ENHANCING TEACHING TOWARD HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS

Channels / Media
In selecting the channels for this communication campaign, this team has considered the
disposition of the message, its purpose, the channels available to the target audience, and how the
audience absorbs information. Based on these criteria, the team has chosen these channels:
Email
This will allow us to reach out to professors to notify them of our training.
Face-to-face Training
Face-to-face, in-person discussions are some the richest forms of
communication. This will also allow Sydnee to share her struggles in the
classroom due to being hard of hearing.
PowerPoint
This is a visual way to present the information during the training.
Video
Interviews of students who struggle in classes due to hearing impairment.
Newsletter Excerpt
o This little excerpt will be put into the faculty newsletter to help reach
professors and notify them of our upcoming training.
Questionnaire
This questionnaire will help get the professors thinking about topics we
want them to think about during the training.

ENHANCING TEACHING TOWARD HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS

Tactical Planning
An effective communications campaign is all about delivering the right information to the
right audience at the right time through the right channels. Below is how the team plans to meet
this requirement:
Who (Audience)
Candida Darling
SLCC Professors

SLCC Professors

What (Message)
Insights on professor
teaching
Clear statement of key
messages.
Get professors interested to
come to this seminar
Clear statement of key
messages.
Addressing a struggle
students have in the
classroom
Ways to enhance their
teaching

How (Channel)
Email
Phone Call
Email
Teaser video for
email and
faculty website
Questionnaire
Newsletter
Questionnaire
Powerpoint
Face to face
discussion
Video

When (Timing)
Before creating
content of campaign
2-3 weeks before
training

Day of seminar

Media Creation
In creating the various media channels we followed a cohesive style guide. For the video
we found students who are hearing impaired and interviewed them using these interview
questions.
Have you ever had a hard time hearing during class?
How do you feel when you dont hear everything thats going on?
Do you always feel comfortable expressing your difficulty hearing to the teacher?
What is an example of a time you had a hard time hearing & why?
How do you feel these situations could be improved?

ENHANCING TEACHING TOWARD HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS

What have professors done to help you in the past?

After interviewing each student one of the team members took bits and pieces to create our teaser
video. Our team also gave a link to the full interview video for anyone who wanted to see the
whole thing. We made sure to have each person wearing a microphone so that there was not any
background noise. On a few of the other media channels we utilized a website called Canvas to
create the survey and email graphic. In doing this we good keep a consistent style guide across
our media channels.
Debrief
Overall the project went well and relatively smooth. We made a few changes to our plan
after talking with the director of the disability resource center, Candida Darling. She suggested
putting an excerpt of our training into the faculty newsletter and getting in touch with a few other
people about the emails. She also suggested that we could have our video posted to the new
faculty website that they are in the process of creating. In the process of creating the material
there were a few bumps in the road where interviewing went longer than expected, the video
took longer than expected to edit, and some other small things. From this we learned that it
would be better to plan more in advance and give more time for video editing. However, we
were able to meet our goals and go above our own expectations, especially with the design and
style of our campaign. We were able to create a style guide almost identical to SLCCs to
reinforce that this is a campaign towards professors at SLCC.

ENHANCING TEACHING TOWARD HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS

Conclusion
The design, collection, analyses, and summary of the critical needs of the students who
are deaf and hard-of-hearing would not have possible without the involvement of all the teaching
staffs. The activities have been designed to capitalize and build upon existing professional
development structures on campus, and increase the capacity of faculty, staff, and administrators
at SLCC to fully meet the unique and varied learning needs of the students (hard-of-hearing). As
we approach the new technology age, it is crucial that we design full-fledged students life
programming through which students will experience greater and stronger academic enjoyment
and success.

ENHANCING TEACHING TOWARD HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS

10

References
Salt Lake Community College. (2014). Salt Lake Community College Fact Book. Salt Lake
Community College. Retrieved from http://www.slcc.edu/about/factbooks/fact-book2014-2015.pdf
Marsh, S. (2015, January 27). Five top reasons people become teachers and why they quit.
Retrieved April 01, 2016, from http://www.theguardian.com/teachernetwork/2015/jan/27/five-top-reasons-teachers-join-and-quit
Leblanc, R. (1999). Good Teaching: The Top Ten Requirements. Retrieved April 01, 2016, from
http://biz.colostate.edu/mti/tips/pages/GoodTeaching.aspx
Race/Ethnicity of college faculty. (2013). Retrieved April 01, 2016, Retrieved from
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61