Questions 27

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Art-based training for engineers

An assessment of how effective an art-based program was in improving the communication skills of engineers.

The CONNECT Program in the Engineering School of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art has served as a laboratory for testing the effectiveness of art-based learning for technical graduates. [Crack IELTS with Rob] Our underlying concept with CONNECT is that most communication breakdowns involving engineers happen because they know every aspect of their subject matter and assume that others do too. Engineers spend a great deal of time ensuring their work is accurate, and their solutions to engineering problems are workable, meet official requirements, are environmentally sound, and so on. They are persuaded by sound content. Others may not be.

Communicating with an audience is essentially a social skill with a behavioral basis. A fact that becomes all too apparent when one’s audience has a divergent set of assumptions. Failing to understand your audience opens up an ‘audience gap’. To give engineering graduates the skills to close this gap. CONNECT turned to the theatre. Performing artists specialize in the effective communication of any content- good, bad, or indifferent- through vocal, physical, and socially appropriate behaviors keyed to a particular audience. CONNECT applied stage movement analysis to interaction with clients, meetings with colleagues, and job interviews. It also made use of vocal and physical exercises and directing techniques, to equip technical personnel for the everyday communication challenges they face, as well as for formal talks.

Attending workshops based on the CONNECT model resulted in observably improved behaviors. Our data demonstrate that, while not every engineer is likely to become a great communicator, almost all are capable of becoming better communicators. [Crack IELTS with Rob] In a survey of corporate recruiters, potential employees who had taken one or more CONNECT workshops were rated higher overall in areas such as confidence and maturity than those who had not participated in CONNECT. Those who had taken a range of workshops, including one in advanced non-verbal behavior, were rated even higher. These results were achieved after mixed early assessment results led us to significantly refine our methods.

Just as important to the improvements we saw after the first year was an adjustment to how we approached the students themselves. We needed ti practice what we reached, and that meant understanding our own audience of young engineers. We needed to behave in ways that would get through to them. Too often in early workshops, our performer-facilitators assumed that a technical audience would respond to theatrical training material in the same positive way that performers did. However, we came to realize that technical audiences need to be approached differently if arts-based training is to achieve its full potential.

Adjusting our approach to achieve this was key to the improvement in results. Changing how we behaved toward our audience of young engineers required real sensitivity to what was happening in the workshops, and to how our facilitators related to the students. [Crack IELTS with Rob] What we learned during this process can be distilled into ‘rules’ for maximizing the effectiveness of performing-arts –based training in a technical field.

The first ‘rule’ is to customize on a continual basis, adapting a performance for a particular audience is second nature to performing artists. What works on Friday night may not work at the Sunday matinee. Similarly, what is effective in training chemical engineers may not work for their civil engineering or electrical engineering colleagues. And what works for engineers in general will certainly not work for each individual engineer. We have recognized the value of individualized attention and our facilitators send each participant away with something specific to his or her needs.

A second ‘rule’ is to avoid being ‘touchy feely’ unless the purpose is clear. Although actors do not think twice about standing in a circle and ‘passing a ball of energy’ from person to person, or closing their eyes and imaging themselves at a ‘favourite place’ the majority of engineers do not respond in quite the same way. In fact, the CONNECT participants often felt that this part of the workshop was a ‘waste of time’. And nothing- nothing- is more counterproductive when it comes to coaching technical trainees. [Crack IELTS with Rob] However, when the value of such activities is clearly related to the stated purpose of the workshop- to improve performance-few people will get the point more quickly than an engineer.

There are at least three approaches possible for facilitating a workshop, and the final’ rule’ is to incorporate these in the most appropriate way. The ‘prescriptive’ approach tells trainees what is necessary, the ‘experiential’ approach lets them personally experience what happens when a new element is added to a situation, and the ‘demonstrative’ approach requires them to observe certain ways of doing things. The prescriptive approach, although the engineers tended to expect it, was by far the least effective, while the experiential approach met resistance because the purpose of the exercise was not always immediately obvious. The demonstrative approach, on the other hand, mirrors the way technical objects are accomplished, which is to solve problems through testing and observation. The observation of effective and ineffective communication behaviors in others proved to be a good way of demonstrating the options available to everyone.

These ‘rules’ are, of course, only a starting point. We have learned to apply them both rigorously and with flexibility. At the Engineering School of The Cooper Union, customization menat establishing a mini-conservatory. [Crack IELTS with Rob] We have learned that you can’t close someone else’s audiencegap without looking at things from their perspective. In another setting, playing to the technical audience might require a completely different sort of customization and a subtly differen set of training behaviors. What CONNECT has shown is that knowing one’s audience – and knowing it specifically rather than generally- is fundamental.