Speech Problems at Ramsey

Apologies for the belated post--I have no excuse except for my recent forgetfulness. In the past couple weeks, the students have been working on creating and performing speeches. I started at Ramsey in the middle of the students' previous unit, and it has been nice to get to see this one from start to finish. I spent a lot of time working with kids on basics like how to use power point to display pictures, how to structure speeches, and how to do research. I enjoyed getting the time to interact with the students more one on one and to see aspects of their personalities come out in the speech topics they chose.

When performance time rolled around, some of the kids put together really fabulous speeches and had clearly put a lot of effort into preparing to give their speeches to the rest of the class. That said, many students did not. The classes are all fairly large and it took three days to get through all the students. Those who were prepared signed up for the first day, and from then on, the further down the list their teacher got, the worse the speeches got. I feel like, while exposing kids to public speaking in middle school is important, more time needed to be spent on the "how" part of speech giving. Lots of time was devoted to the kids writing speeches, but I think many needed more help figuring out how to give a solid speech, and they definitely needed more modeling of what that should look like. Granted, I was not there every day, but I'm not sure they ever got a concrete example of a speech being performed. Additionally, many of the students had a lot of anxiety about having to perform their speeches because they lacked confidence in their reading abilities and were afraid to even use note cards in front of 13-year-old peers who are not known for their sensitivity.

I am not sure why there was not more time put into the "how" factor. When the students did their poetry unit, they had weeks upon weeks of writing and examples before compiling their final projects for the unit. Speeches lasted three weeks (I think) and were somewhat disrupted by schedule changes to accommodate state exams. For me, the part that needed the most improvement was helping students prepare to get up in front of their peers and perform original work. I understood why students who had low confidence about reading skills did not feel as though being able to use note cards was going to benefit them. Those students for the most part did not even bother to write speeches because, in true ed psych form, it is easier to not do it than to do it and experience the feared failure. I think the supportive piece that was missing is hard to incorporate into a system with so many kids and so little time, coupled with a constant sense of urgency to get students where they need to be for state exams, but I think that not figure out a way to build in support and caring is going to hurt students more in the long run because it perpetuates feelings of inadequacy and learned helplessness that students have come to equate with school. I don't have a good solution for how to teach skills like public speaking in a way that does not marginalize students, but I hope I can come up with one before I take on my own classroom.