Alien Pedagogy

More and more, I find myself trying to break students from falling back on bad Power Point presentation habits. I do think students should present with a visual aid, but that aid should be an aid — not the presentation.

So at the start of our current unit, I asked students several questions. One was “what is more important in delivering a great presentation: the slide or the person speaking?”

Every student said the person. So I asked this:

How often do we spend more time preparing the slides than our conducting research or rehearsing our speech?

When I was in school, I was required to give presentations but was rarely given time to practice public speaking.

So here’s how my speaking drill lesson goes.

• Identify / Re-list speaking skills. I use the skills identified in Holt’s Elements of Language.
• Students Identify Goals in Writing – Based on skills that are identified, past lessons and feedback, or past experiences.
• Digital Projector Slide Show – I collect ten slides and project them without label. Students use this to generate topics and opinion statements. Over time, I invite students to begin collecting these images.
• Preparation Time. Tell students how much time they need to speak and how much time they have to prepare.
• Speeches. I usually ask 9s to speak for one minute at first, working with just a hook, an introduction, one argument, a conclusion, and call to action. I also use time signals.
• Feedback is immediate. This can be done through self reflection, peer coaching, or teacher feedback. I once sat in the seat of the student that was speaking and wrote feedback in their notebook.

The biggest improvements that I have seen are that students tend to look less at the slide, they tend to produce better summative presentations, and their topics and opinions become more interesting given practice.

Parliament is something I made up on the spot this week (no doubt someone else already has a better word for this activity). I realized that my class had jumped ahead of the other slot, so I gave them three options for class and they chose parliament, largely due to its snazzy name.

Parliament was ultimately just a three-sided debate on a few lofty subjects.

What was odd though was that even after it ended, the class continued debating and calling for permission to speak.

I don’t think I can go back to just a “class discussion” again.

The major assessment in our poetry unit was presentations.

On the whole, I am very satisfied with this year’s presentations. They were by far the most successful presentations that any of my classes have ever given.

• In speaking, our principle was professionalism.
• In critical thinking, our process was to interpret the theme and analyze three ways in which that theme was presented poetically.
• In technology, our aim was to give Power Point a very minor role. People and their ideas were the focus.
• In file storage, USBs were not allowed to be used (I blamed my Vista computer), so our presentations did not contain people running around with flash cards at the last minute. Our classes were about the skills being taught, rather than frantic uploading and excuses about file loss.
• In reading poetry, our aim was creativity through team reading (this was by far the least successful objective of the assignment).

On the whole, students seem proud of their work in this unit and I’m pleased too.

The major assessment of our poetry unit was a presentation.

Students were given a variety of tasks to prepare for this assignment. Here are the ones that were meant to prepare them for the presentation:

• Class reading of “Ballad of Birmingham” that focused on identifying three poetic techniques, an interpretation of the theme, and the identification of key quotes. We began with making a plan to read poetry strategically before we began to read.
• One class to form partners, choose poems from the poetry collection, and make strategies for reading those poems.
• One class of reader’s theater to push the idea of reading poetry creatively as a group.
• One class to create a point-form outline of analysis.
• Class reading of “Woman Work” that streamlined our reading process that began with “Ballad of Birmingham.”
• Homework Assignment: Finding Poetic Techniques in Popular Culture (the best was an analysis of the logo of a laxative)
• One class of Bob Ross notes on speaking skills.
• One class that required students to in pairs organized a speech that related to one of ten slides shown to them at the start of class.
• One class to link their outlines to slides.
• Presentations.

Almost every task in this unit was designed to maximize student success in the major assessment. So as long as the major assessment is directly related to our curriculum goals (and I think it is), then this may qualify as the most focused unit I’ve ever taught.