Return on Investment

Return on Investment
By
Adrian Pauley

Education often avoids taking a pragmatic approach to teaching and learning outcomes. Anything that smacks of return, affordability and financial benefit is viewed with suspicion and disregard. I would like to offer you a way of improving a return to both students and school in relation to teaching the skills of Oral Presentations.
In my early years of teaching my method of teaching oral presentation skills tended to be very superficial and lacking in definite skills development. I would mouth the various platitudes about content, voice, gesture, stance and use of notes and then set my classes on their merry way. After years of not being satisfied with the overall results I decided to develop some resources that were both meaningful and worked.
Step 1: Ensure you have a supportive and interested English Co-ordinator. Persuade them of the benefits that outstanding speakers can bring. The overall grades for Senior English students tend to improve markedly if they have been taught the skills in their formative years at secondary school.
Step 2: Ask that a sufficient period of time be set aside to teach the skills. In any one year, at least two blocks of three weeks is required.
Step 3: Resources such as video cameras, lecterns stop watches.
Step 4 : Follow the Speak Well program.
This program is a three Stage program that can be taught over any period of time from one to three years. It includes three Units of Work and parallels the three most common types of writing in the curriculum.—Informative, Reflective and Persuasive . For the purposes of this article I will refer to the Unit on Persuasive Speaking.

The structure of the grid layout is to show you how the Persuasive Oral can be taught in a logical and structure manner. Each Lesson has Warm Up activities which include Word Games and Impromptu speaking topics followed by teaching one specific skill area.
So in summary I encourage you to take time to develop the speaking skills of your students. Start in Year 8 and build on the skills as they progress through the years. By the time they reach Yr 11 all that will be necessary will be a brief recap of the skills thus allowing more time for teaching of the task. If you want further support email me at ancpauley@bigpond.com