Integrating Communication Skills and Planning Techniques

Practitioners have long stressed the need to teach professional commumcations skills to planning students. This paper describes ten years of experience in teaching a course in which communications skills and techniques of gathering and analyzing information are taught concurrently while investigating a problem of importance in the community. The course involves an ongoing collaboration, a "marriage of convenience," between an academic and a planner, casting city/county planning staff as clients for students This has proven useful for pedagogy and has had some positive impact on the community. Many planning departments often assign the responsibility of teaching courses related to skills-building and communication to junior faculty. But only a paucity of literature and support materials exist to help the faculty in this endeavor. This paper presents the lessons we have learned from a ten-year collaboration in teaching a skills-building, practical-methods course, &dquo;Urban Planning 505, Planning Techniques&dquo; (UP505), to entry-level graduate students in the Master’s of Urban Planning Program at the University of Michigan. UP505 is a four-credit required course taught in the second sixteen-week academic term in the first year of the Mastr-r’s program. We attempt to integrate the development of good communication skills in professional planners with teaching some basic planning techniques. The course helps prepare students for an integrative, six-credit workshop that is a required capstone course for students in the final (fourth) term of the program. In this workshop students prepare implementable plans for r~al clients in Detroit’s inner-city neighborhoods.2 Although assignments in UP505 require problem solving and development of an effective planning strategy, producing immediately implementable, detailed plans is not the primary objective. The goal is to teach problem definition, information gathering, and analytic techniques concurrently with effective communication skills. The problems investigated in UP505 involve long-range, directional-setting exercises aimed at providing the student with the &dquo;big picture&dquo; of planning practice. The objectives of UP505 echo many of those of the traditional workshop course in planning.3 It has indeed been designed to help entry-level planning students begin to function as professional planners. But, it is also designed to encourage them to think explicitly not just about content but also about the form and style of information delivery so as to achieve good professional communication. The course structure is therefore a hybrid. It involves lectures with demonstrations of techniques and skills along with workshops where students &dquo;learn by doing&dquo; by gathering information in the field and analyzing and presenting it in the classroom. The course, which we have refined over the last ten years, is presented here in detail in its current configuration. Courses similar to UP505 appear to be making a comeback in Master’s of Urban Planning programs (see Wetmore and Heumann 1984). This contribution along with other recent articles on parallel endeavors which have appeared in this journal may be useful to those faculty teaching similar courses.4 This paper describes the following aspects of the course: 1. the stimulus for developing the course, its evolution, specific tasks completed, and the methods stressed; 2. the actors involved in the course (students, academics, clients, public, Integrating o municati ill