Communication Strategies

We work and live in an environment where we interact with many people throughout our daily activities. It is imperative that communication be of the highest quality in order to make information flow easily and bring the results it was intended to. Communication is a way of passing information and also a way of getting information from and between parties and its effectiveness leads to good results in the long run.

Stereotypes are popular believes usually associated with a particular group of people or an individual. One perspective of the stereotypes is the out group which is an assessment of people in ways that make them inferior to the others. In the movie Remember the Titans it is easy to note this aspect among the community in Alexander, Virginia coming from the local white community directed to the black minority. The town folks are against the integration of the black students into the white schools and they openly express their displeasure at this. The situation is even made worse once the local school appoints a new black coach, Herman Boone despite his past proven winning record.

Boone is a professional coachbut the white community cannot understand how their own, coach Bill Yoast is overlooked in the selection process. Yoast does not even allow his daughter to play with Boone’s daughter and keeps putting coach Boone down. Boone though devices a technique to keep communication flowing between him and the players on and off the pitch by taking the boys on a boot camp and pairing a black and a white player and making them learn something new about each other every day. This makes the players talk eventually and thus in the end they become friends once the communication barriers were broken. Communication knows no barriers, Boone told them.

There are expectations that the society has on us all as groups and as individuals. The elders are expected to assist in framing the young people’s lives as the young are expected to obey and respect their elders. In the case of Remember the Titans, Coach Boone came to the new integrated T.C Williams High School at a difficult time but with a set agenda. He was expected to lead the High School team to win their next game and he even surpassed these expectations by uniting the boys who were of different races and making the community see what acceptance can do for the community at large.

At first the players were skeptical of each other but they were all expected to win their games. The players went on to win not only the state championships but also recorded a perfect season. Expectations can either make or break people and in the case of the movie, all the different people involved took up their different challenges to meet the expected from them.Different communication strategies were used between the characters in this movie and the most effective were stereotypes and expectations. Cognitive ability was ineffective basically because coach Boone did not have the time to sit and mourn that the black community for which he belonged was being attacked by the whites, he took charge of the situation and even made the rest of the people see that working together in harmony could bring winning results despite of the racial and other differences between the people in the community.

Proper communication was the key that he taught his team that finally made the players talk, understand and accept each other.