Well spoken: a format for oral communication instruction

Over the years I have been in many classrooms where a presentation has been assigned. I have witnesses horrific presentations where students read their notes in a monotone without ever glancing up, ones that were full of emotion but nearly empty of content, and ones that were inaudible. I have seen teachers who failed to instruct in speaking skills repeatedly make students repeat presentations because they were not using a loud enough voice or not reading a poster that was full of content that we could not read from the audience. Occasionally I have witnessed the naturally talented and usually drama trained student perform and truly enjoyed a meaningful presentation. I have tried to work with teachers to adjust rubrics for presentations with some success. Erik Palmer's Well Spoken: Teaching Speaking to All Students presents a format that can be utilized to both instruct and evaluate presentation skills.

The Common Core State Standards include a strand for speaking and listening although neither the PARCC nor Smarter Balance nor NYS assessments include an evaluation of these skills. Since they are not evaluated, it is easy to predict that they will be glossed over or forgotten. Unless teachers take action, speaking and listening will at best be a back burner skill, rarely taught, usually expected and frequently slaughtered in application. Well Spoken's framework is poised to fill this gap and demonstrate how teachers can integrate oral communication into their curriculum. If a district were to adopt the concept or a similar one, consistency of vocabulary and expectation would result in students acquiring a life skill.

This book is easy to read. Short chapters highlight each of the areas of presentation. Palmer breaks these skills into two areas: Building the speech and performing the speech. In building the speech, he highlights areas that ELA teachers would recognize: audience, content, and organization. Then he adds visual aids and student appearance. You can see my blog on visual aids and their importance in presentations. Students also need to be aware that their appearance is a way that they are judged. When giving a formal presentation in front of a group, students need to learn to dress appropriately.

When it comes to presentation or performance standards, he uses his acronym PVLEGS to describe skills that need to be taught, practiced, and evaluated. The third part of the book's chapter titles are a great introduction to these skills:

• Poise: appearing calm and confident
• Voice: making every word heard
• Life: passion into the voice
• Eye-contact: engaging each listener
• Gestures: matching motions to words
• Speed: pacing for a powerful performance

At the end of the book is a detailed rubric to evaluate student performance. For presentations he recommends two grades- one on the building part- content is king here, and one on the presentation part. What I found particularly nice about this was his thoughts that you do not need to evaluate every skill every time. Like in writing, you can tell students that you are going to focus on one area and provide feedback on that aspect of speaking, letting the other ones ride. For a more formal presentation, more skills should be evaluated. For short presentations like participating in a Socratic seminar, show and tell or short presentations one or two aspects become the focus.

I liked his comparison of teachers not asking students to do presentations because they are afraid of it to teachers not asking students to do math because they are afraid of it. We need to push students to do these skills and teach them what is expected, not leave it unwritten. True, at the beginning, students will not be very skilled, but with focus and practice, they will improve. After all if we are going to get our students college and career ready they need to be prepared for the first test of oral communication skills- the interview.

Well Spoken- visual aids

I was introduced to Erik Palmer in an online video highlighting his PVLEGS program for teaching students to present speeches. The video inspired me to get the book, Well Spoken: Teaching Speaking to All Students, and having read the book, I am forced to reflect on the oral interpretation class I took in college. My oral interpretation class was horrible. I gave four or five speeches, one was quite good, one quite bad and the rest mediocre, but you would not have known that from the feedback I received. The best one was not because I had learned impressive speaking skills, but more out of luck. Unfortunately, this is how many of our students create presentations. This book has been a delight to read, short chapters, engaging writing and practical suggestions abound.

The author's chapter on visual aids makes me cringe when I think about the many poster and presentation projects I have helped students with over the years. Teachers have requested explicit power points that kill presentation because they are too word dense, colors and animations that distract and confuse, and images that obstruct meaning. I have watched Prezis whose movements make me nauseous to watch. Posters have needed to look like research projects with text in many colors and fonts that are difficult to read.  I think teachers do this because they want to add variety that will engage students or posters to hang on the walls for open house, but what they really want is an essay or test or worksheet of some sort.

To create meaningful visual aids, students need to know that they enhance a presentation or deliver a single, simple message. If we do not keep this as the critical focus, we teach them bad habits that are likely to harm students later on. No one in a debate wants someone to appear with a paper mustache that was created for the express purpose of having a visual aid per requirement for the activity. (Yes, I saw a student do this.) The guidelines that the author sets forth are as valid for advertisement, commercial poster creation, and debate candidate visuals as for classroom activities. The four guidelines that are put forth for visual aids are:

1. relevance- relate to the topic at hand
2. importance- not repeat what the speaker will say and indicate or highlight something critical
3. accessibility- at the level of the audience AND big enough, clear enough and visually appealing
4. simple- KISS; not too many words, colors, fonts, arrows or animations; not distracting

If we were to teach students that these are critical components for any visual aid, then the products we get would be more likely to enhance presentations. Simpler, more meaningful visuals will also make presentations more about content than about catchy imagery. We need to change how we design visual aid assignments and presentations that might include a visual. If we need an essay in addition to the aid require that, do not require the aid to be the essay. Students need to be taught these elements of effective visual design and then given opportunities to practice them. We will be teaching them something that will be valuable as a life skill, not just a classroom activity. Students, might however, be cautioned that they need to clearly understand the requirements of a project for other classes in case a teacher confuses what makes a good visual aid with what allows a teacher to know as much as possible about a student's knowledge.

Never work harder than your students

Robyn R. Jackson's Never Work Harder than your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching is a wonderful text that highlights seven principles of gifted teachers, emphasizes that they can be learned and presents a strategy for improving teaching from wherever a teacher is.

Her seven principles are:

1. Start where your students are.
2. Know where your students are going.
3. Expect to get your students to their goal.
4. Support your students along the way.
5. Use feedback to help you and your students get better.
6. Focus on quality rather than quantity.
7. Never work harder than your students.

As a special educator I especially appreciate her start where your students are. In this age of increasing standards, it is all too easy to start where you want your students to be. This is a formula for Swiss cheese learning that results in a subsequent collapse at some point (hopefully later down the road when the student is someone else's "problem"). I have repeatedly worked with students who have been pushed through without actually learning material and the next year they start at the same place as the students who got it. These students experience frustration and failure on a regular basis. Teachers complain that, "He cannot get it," but accept little responsibility to get him there. I have spent endless time filling in missing knowledge and supporting learning at level so that the student does not fall farther behind. If we are going to pretest students to rate the teachers, can we also use that data to inform instruction and help fill holes and build bridges over the chasms so that the student can experience some meaningful learning?

The feedback idea also resonates with me. Having just finished Role Reversal (see this link) which talks extensively about feedback, I see the value in this principle. It is incumbent upon us as teachers to give meaningful feedback. No one learns when three papers are returned the day after the quarter/ trimester/ semester ends. A "C" tells us nothing. If we comment about everything, students are overwhelmed and ignore it all. Let them redo assignments after they make corrections that you guided them to make. Not by circling a word and writing sp or adding in missing transitions, but by asking them to look back at spelling, use spell check, or give a mini lesson on a spelling rule, or give a lesson on effective transitions and asking students to look for transitions in their paper and improving them. We need focused feedback that allows students to learn. In order to provide this feedback, the sixth principle comes into play. If you are working on introductions, there is no need to write a paper, write an introduction. If you want students to recap the causes you identified for the French Revolution, a list does just as well as an essay. If students need to be able to identify conclusions from lab results, only have them write that portion of the lab and fill in the blanks for the data elsewhere.

For teachers looking for a framework for refining their skills, Never Work Harder than Your Students is excellent. Teachers can take the pretest and identify focus areas for self-development. Possible steps to develop a particular principle in practice are provided so that someone cannot say, I don't know how. Jackson also includes a variety of Yes, but... sections throughout the text. Some of these are more useful than others, but they attempt to respond to common roadblocks that people perceive. ASCD has a variety of webinars by Jackson archived that talk about using her framework to develop struggling students and teacher skills alike. For those who want to explore without buying a book, Jackson's website, Mindsteps is a wealth of resources and information as well.

students measuring their own progress

We were at a faculty meeting and a veteran teacher commented that it wasn't practical to try and measure high school students growth on a graph. This did scare me. We are a special education department. Special education is supposed to be about data collection and analysis to identify what needs work and how successful our interventions are being. My first comment was that I had an algebra student who did not know his multiplication facts. I worked with him every day for about 5 minutes a day on this skill and we graphed the number of facts he could solve in one minute. It was extremely motivating. This student who had said he could never learn the facts was able to solve 60 problems in 1 minute by the end of the year. He saw himself as successful at something as a result of his effort for the first time. It was amazing how his confidence in himself grew. I have had students graph the number of words they can read fluently in a minute, how long it takes to identify the time on 9 clocks and how many vocabulary words they can identify from a unit. Yes, these were all secondary students, from seventh to eleventh grade. No, much of this was not part of the coursework they were doing, but it was important, so I carved time out of our block together to work on it and the students felt successful.

I have been reading Robyn Jackson's Never Work Harder Than Your Students. She reiterated how important students tracking their progress is. This is something that has been cited repeatedly in the literature, and as you noticed, something that my anecdotes bear out as well.  Critics will say that I have done these graphs in resource rooms with small student numbers and it is true. It is not the only way it can be done. Graphing spelling words and math facts is something my teachers had our class do thirty-five years ago. If we want to graph things related to the CCSS then graphs like the one below can be used.

Grade three writing scoring

level	content and analysis
4
3
2
1
0
assignment

level	command of evidence
4
3
2
1
0
assignment

level	coherence, organization, and style
4
3
2
1
0
assignment

level	control of conventions
4
3
2
1
0
assignment

The titles of each section correspond to the areas of evaluation found on the scoring rubric. This could be done for any important area that a rubric exists. It should be considered with activities that will be long lasting. You can see improvement if a writing sample is done twice a quarter. Bar or lines could be used to mark the progress.

Students can see where they are, where they have been and where they need to go. Students can fill them out themselves and track their progress, teachers can look in to see how students are doing in individual areas. This is something that can be done across the curriculum and over the spectrum of grades. Students can focus their learning, teachers can focus their instruction and parents can see the progress that their children make. It can be done. It is an element of good teaching. It doesn't take long for students to complete. We need to invest in ways to improve our instruction. This is a little thing that can mean much more than what is the average of his homework.