Telephone Skills

Telephone Etiquette and Message Taking- Locate a list of Phone Manners and how to handle particular situations involving the telephone: What would you say to someone who called during dinner?, What would you say to someone who called your brother, who was unable to come to the phone?, What would you say to a stranger who called and cursed at you?, What would you say to someone who would not tell you his or her name? This was done through discussion, modeling, and post test. We also discuss the usage of *69, ( which redials the number that just called you), caller ID for telephone security, and the benefits of having an unlisted phone number.

Telephone Skills by Carrie Matthews

EBSCO curriculum materials,

P.O. Box 1943, Birmingham, AL, 35201

 

For Secondary Vocational- good program to teach telephone skills.

I used this program for the activity below. You could make up your own tapes with messages for the same purpose.

Follow up to telephone manners is a skill based lesson of taking messages using a telephone message sheet and without a telephone message sheet. The messages are on audio tapes. The student listens to the taped recorded messages and fills in the message sheets with the required information; date, time, to:, caller, where the caller was from, phone number of the caller, message, their name, whether the caller wanted (please call, called, will call again, returned your call- boxes to be checked off).

Collect Data on how many times each student required listening to the message to get all the information written down.  Do 10-20 messages per student in order to give them a chance to progress on this skill.

This can be an area of difficulty for a student with auditory memory and/or written language problems. A possible compensatory strategy would be to teach the student to have a tape recorder near the telephone and record the telephone message into the tape. Teach the student to repeat back the message to the caller to be sure the information is correct. Use a headset for students with mobility limitations.