How Clear Communication Changed the Way I Help Students
- Jun 7
- 3 min read
By SARAN.B
There was a moment a few years ago when a student walked out of my session looking more confused than when she walked in. She had come to me with a straightforward question about essay structure. I had answered it — thoroughly, I thought. I used the right terminology, covered every angle, gave her plenty to work with. But somewhere between my explanation and her understanding, something had broken down completely.
That moment stuck with me longer than it probably should have. I kept replaying it. What did I say? Where did I lose her? I had given her all the right information and none of what she actually needed.
That was the day I started taking communication seriously — not as a soft skill, not as something that just happens naturally, but as something you have to deliberately work at.
The first thing I changed was how I listened. Before, I would hear a student's question and immediately start forming my answer. I was always half a step ahead, mentally drafting a response while they were still talking. What I wasn't doing was really understanding what they were asking — or more importantly, why they were asking it.
A student who says "I don't understand this essay prompt" usually isn't confused about the words. They're anxious about whether their idea is good enough, or they're not sure where to start, or they've convinced themselves the whole thing is harder than it is. The surface question and the real question are almost never the same thing.
Once I started listening for the real question underneath the one being asked, everything shifted. My answers got shorter, more direct, and far more useful.
The second thing I changed was my language. I had a habit — one I suspect a lot of educators share — of defaulting to academic vocabulary because it felt more precise. Thesis statement. Argumentative structure. Thematic coherence. These words mean something to me. To a struggling student at ten o'clock at night, they mean nothing.
I started translating. "What's the one thing you want your reader to believe by the end?" is the same question as "what is your thesis?" but it lands completely differently. One invites thinking. The other triggers panic.
This sounds obvious in hindsight. It wasn't obvious when I was doing it wrong.
The third change was the hardest one — learning to sit with silence. When a student went quiet after I explained something, my instinct was to fill that gap immediately. More explanation, a different angle, another example. What I didn't realize was that the silence was often them actually thinking. I was interrupting the best part.
Now I wait. Sometimes uncomfortably long, by old standards. And more often than not, the student arrives at something on their own — a connection, a question, an answer they didn't know they had. My job in those moments isn't to talk. It's to stay quiet long enough to let them think.
None of this made me a dramatically better expert on the subjects I was helping with. My knowledge didn't change. What changed was my ability to actually transfer that knowledge to someone else — which, when you think about it, is the whole point.
The student who walked out confused that day would probably get a very different session now. Not because I know more. Because I finally understood that being helpful and being clear are not the same thing — and that the second one is a skill you have to earn.
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