Student Talk

The post below is copied from a newsletter I receive and frequently forward to the II Conference on First Class. The originial author, Don Mesibov is a pre-service education teacher in New York State.


"Recently, a student wrote in his journal: "I have always been nervous about speaking in front of anyone, even my fellow students in school. This class was different. We were so relaxed and everyone spoke so often that by the end of the semester I was a lot less fearful about speaking and often spoke in front of 24 students and the teacher without giving it a thought."

As you can expect, I was thrilled to read this because I make a conscious effort to nurture a classroom environment that encourages every student to speak, speak often and speak intelligently.

Here are some of my strategies:

1. Every student speaks in front of the class as least once each class, often as many as five or six times. Students speak during a five minute opening activity which accesses prior knowledge, grabs attention and motivates students to want to learn what we are about to study. There is also a closure activity that gives me a chance to learn a little more about what has "stuck" with the students during the lesson. At least one of these activities, often both, requires an individual response from each student with the instruction that the response be confined to ten seconds or less. Occasionally I will pose the question to students in groups of three or four and ask for a reporter to share a 30 second response after allowing a few minutes for group discussion.

2. Rarely do I put a student on the spot to answer, in front of the entire class, a question that has a right or wrong answer. Much more often I will ask for perceptions or I will request opinions with sound rationale. For instance, I would not ask a student to name the 17th president of the United States. I am more likely to ask why students think politicians sometimes take bribes, or I might ask them to look at a list of the Bill of Rights and tell me which they think is the most important and, in 10 seconds, why.

I have to weigh the importance of whatever objective I might have by putting a student on the spot for an answer he might discover is wrong against the priority I want to give toward creating a non-threatening environment that encourages discussion. (I might throw a "right or wrong" question out to the entire class and let volunteers offer responses.)

3. Often I will pose a question that can be answered with a brief response and ask students to write down their answers before I request verbal sharing. People are more comfortable sharing something they have thought about and written down than something to which they have to respond, in front of everyone, spontaneously.

4. If students engage in several activities with the same group I may insist that they rotate reporters so that different students speak for the group each time. This has the same effect as having students write their responses first. When the group agrees on a response, the reporter doesn’t feel the same pressure as when he has to create his own response and risk being wrong in front of the larger audience.
5. Students dialogue in pairs or small groups (never larger than four to a group) anywhere from a quarter of the time spent during a class period to the entire class. I believe that creating situations where students are speaking in small groups contributes to their comfort level when asked to address the entire class.

6. I have frequent small group presentations to the rest of the class. At these times, no student in the group has a lot of presenting to do, but each student does some and this seems to be much easier for them than to be assigned to solo in front of the class.

In one class last week, every student spoke at least three times, even if it was just to give a ten second response to a question. Students worked in small groups much of the time and many students spoke in front of the entire class at least another two or three times as groups reported progress, results, and responses.

When I matriculated from kindergarten to 12th grade and then through college, students rarely spoke in front of the entire class. If we did, it was often when we were embarrassed by a teacher trying to see if we knew an answer or it was the once or twice a year we had to do a solo presentation with our grade riding on it. In other words, most of the time that I was called upon to speak publicly, in school, it was a pressurized situation (for me, at least). No wonder the biggest fear of many people of my generation is public speaking."

Interesting reflections. Thanks, Don.