Teach Teens About Tone of Voice
Explicit instruction can counter misconceptions high school students often have about what is conveyed through speech. We need each other. When human beings are struggling, we trust each other through the gift of our very presence. Having the right person by your side can be incredibly comforting. But throw the wrong person into the mix, and things go haywire. What about our presence can be reassuring, irritating, or insecure to someone else? We read the faces and postures of others and observe their gestures. While listening to the tones of voice that indicate safety or danger. This is a human superpower.
When we know how to connect deeply with others or inadvertently distance ourselves from those who trigger negative emotions. We begin to understand the power of relational contagion, or how our emotions are contagious, as we share our authenticity when we need each other. We can feel how others feel through mirror neurons in the brain. Our tone of voice can tell the truth, and our students know it, no matter what words we speak. Think of your tone of voice as a personalized vocal fingerprint, letting others know how you feel and making any situation feel safe or threatening.
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Incorrect Reading of Tone of Voice
Our tones also have meaning because they project who we are as people. Some people have a consistent sarcastic tone, a warm and caring tone, or a skeptical tone. Over time, these various shades can project your personality. Human beings have a negative brain bias; in states of heightened stress, we quickly notice negative tones, and during adolescence, we can interpret more neutral tones as unfavorable. We must be aware of our tone of voice and control ourselves before speaking, especially if we notice a growing irritation or anger in our nervous system.
If a student is angry or defiant, we can easily and quickly escalate each other by working on her survival response. The better tired we are, the less modest we become. We often assume our students understand how the tone of voice, posture, and gestures impact others. Still, these nonverbal communication skills may need to be taught, discussed, and shared in a co-regulation experience with an adult who learns. Confidence.
In the teenage years, when big emotions are prevalent, students may overreact to an everyday experience or read someone’s expression as negative rather than neutral. Providing space and time to discuss the nuances of nonverbal communication helps develop social skills that are often not developed in childhood and adolescence.
Nonverbal communication can be cultural communication that we misunderstand or misunderstand, as we bring a variety of neurodivergent and culturally divergent communication styles into our schools and classrooms. For the model, eye reference is not a universally respectful motion. Many cultures view eye contact differently, not through a white Eurocentric lens. Voice tones, postures, and gestures can also be misread through a lens that does not represent how an educator might perceive a child’s or adolescent’s culture.
Direct Instruction With Tone of Voice Exercises
Discussing how our tone of voice inadvertently invites people into our lives or pushes them away is a critical practice for students and staff to work together, sharing realistic experiences while giving feedback.
This could occur during a morning or afternoon meeting, at the beginning or end of a class or school day, or when there has been a disruptive incident, and we have an opportunity to share and repair. There are engaging paths to help students and ourselves understand the extent of our tone of voice and how it clicks with others.
Here are some examples to test one against the other:
A. Share the same sentence or phrase in a calm, angry, then sad tone.
- Please share that with everyone.
- What happened to you?
- follow me
- I don’t know.
- What do you mean?
- I don’t understand.
B. Examine the angry and sad tones. Please share what you notice about someone’s tone of voice when angry. How does your voice change? How can you speak when a friend is unhappy? What about your tone of voice?
C. Discuss the ideas you get from a person’s voice. When you hear someone’s voice but can’t see it, how hard or easy is it to know how they feel? Why?
D. Delve into the causes of misunderstandings. Have there been times when you assumed you knew a family member, friend, or classmate was feeling or thinking, but you were wrong? What did you misunderstand?
As we think about the power of our tone of the agent, we require to understand that we also share through sounds called vocal firings. These sound like, oh, huh? and mmm, They speak and understand each other between cultures, even between our species. Vocal outbursts have been aligned with 24 emotions, and the research is fascinating. This study identifies and maps the 24 feelings and aligned vocal bursts. First investigated by Alan Cowen and his colleagues at Stanford. In conclusion, we traditionally focus on words. Relationships are strengthened when we become intentional and aware of our superpower: the tone of voice, the gestures, and the postures that underlie our words.
