Modeling imperfect communication can be used as a classroom tool to get students comfortable talking and asking questions about topics they don?t know well, and to provide easy, low-stakes practice in constructive criticism. By having an instructor purposefully present a topic badly and then invite students to provide feedback and suggestions, it helps set the tone for open discussion. This also allows the instructor to give guidance for appropriate and useful feedback. My co-instructor and I successfully used this tool to set the tone on the first day of an interdisciplinary research-focused undergraduate lab course. Students from a variety of backgrounds in terms of year, major, and experience were put into groups to design and carry out a computational biology research project. One of the major goals of this course was to teach and facilitate interdisciplinary communication, and lab presentations with peer feedback were included throughout the course. We expected that all students would be coming into the course unfamiliar with some aspects of the project, so having them willing to speak up and answer questions where they didn?t understand, and point out where presentations were confusing, was very important. In this workshop I walked participants through an example of imperfect communication as I used it in this lab course, providing the same guidance and instructions given to the students. We discussed strategies to implement this in other courses and recommendations for guiding peer feedback.
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