Public Speaking
1. A problem
The ability to speak clearly, powerfully, and naturally to groups of people is a universally-agreed-upon superpower. But: public speaking is terrifying.
2. Basic plan
Acclimate students by having them do very short (30–60 second) presentations in first grade. Schedule quick (60–120 second) speeches throughout the school day. Later, do more formal (2–3 minute) speeches to larger groups — other classes, visiting adults, retirement communities, school assemblies…
3. What you might see
Classes playing speaking games to get comfortable with oh crap oh crap everyone is looking at me.
Students using their Learning in Depth knowledge to answer prompts like:
tell us a story about…
tell us a joke about…
tell us a metaphor about…
And because of all this, a common understanding arising among students: public speaking is scary, but it’s a fear we can deal with.
4. Why?
Not only is this one phobia that schools can cure, the benefits of curing it are life changing. The skills one learns through public speaking — how to exude confidence, handle big emotions, stand straight, keep eye contact, predict what others will find interesting — don’t disappear when you step off the stage. They make other social experiences less scary.
5. Egan’s insight
Where do we see this in the human experience?
Talking and writing are both ways to communicate. And yet, people who are great conversationalists can be terrible writers. What gives?
The skills that make someone a joy to talk to are quite different from the skills that make them enjoyable to read. But writing well isn’t some alien skillset: it’s an attempt to capture on a page some of the power that we feel in a formal speech.
What sets “formal” speaking apart from talking is that (1) you’ve prepared what you’re going to say beforehand, and (2) people aren’t supposed to interrupt you.
How might this build different kinds of understanding?
What we don’t want to do is just have kids relay information. That’s the recipe for terrible public speaking.1 Instead, we want to give them prompts to use the MYTHIC tools: 🧙♂️JOKES, 🧙♂️METAPHORS, 🧙♂️STORIES, 🧙♂️VIVID MENTAL IMAGES, 🧙♂️EMOTIONAL BINARIES, 🧙♂️A SENSE OF MYSTERY, 🧙♂️RIDDLES, and so on. (What do these weird emoji mean?)
6. This might be especially useful for…
Shy introverts. (Though come to think of it, the “short time” aspect might also be good for voluble know-it-alls…)
7. Critical questions
Q: Oh my GOSH kids suck at public speaking. As a teacher, doing this would be like sticking my arm into a bucket of fire ants every. Single. Day.
This might be an apt moment to suggest that the benefits to keeping the speeches short don’t only accrue to the students.
Q: This would be too scary for some kids. What if one of them reacts badly and doesn’t ever want to do it again?
Part of being a teacher, of course, is having the wisdom to make special exemptions for students who really need it.
And an “exemption” needn’t be all-or-nothing: a student who’s scared of this will often be satisfied with merely doing it a little less. I sorta run my Science is WEIRD small-group seminars as public-speaking workshops (with very short speeches: 5–15 seconds), and require students to volunteer to speak at least five times a class. Those students who are too shy can usually be talked into a compromise: they speak at least three times.
Q: But quantity isn’t quality. Will this really teach the skills of public speaking? What if they just keep sucking?
Honestly, if we can just make them not scared crapless when they speak, we’ll have done so much for the quality of their speeches. But yes, we can go further and help them actually become excellent speakers. This requires a few practices, which I’ll limn out in the coming patterns of Teach Deliberate Practice° and Give Immediate Feedback°. It also, though, will require a list of content — speaking moves to master. Someone who’s gone through a year or two of Toastmasters could whip this up in a drunken minute, and I invite them to try in the comments section.
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8. Physical space
In a classroom
I want to say “put a soapbox on the floor”, but that’s just inviting a sprained ankle. Instead, tape off a square on the floor in the space you normally teach, and tell students it’s a magic box and when they speak they have to stay within it. (Vary the size and shape of the tape as time goes by. Get creative.)
Also possibly having a big sand timer in the back would be a good investment — something the speaker can see, but most others can’t.
At home
Homes are informal by design,2 so this is probably the more challenging space. It might be worth it to create a incredibly small stage — a wooden box? do people still make wooden boxes? — for your kid(s) to stand on top of.
9. Who else is doing this?
The obvious answer here is Toastmasters. Toastmasters — which is one century old this year! — is the go-to worldwide public-speaking club. They were gamifying the skills of speech decades before anyone knew that term: their meetings are scheduled to the literal minute, and, when done competently, hum like a machine.
GOSH I love Toastmasters.3
Toastmasters does run student groups (or at least they did pre-pandemic — the community has been diminished since), but of course we want something spread throughout the school day.
How might we start small, now?
It really is terrifying to speak formally — and friends are often even harder than strangers. Next time you’re at a party, or, heck, at dinner, propose people do a 30-second talk on the first topic on this random topic generator. Make it really scary by having people stand up to speak.
10. Related patterns
To be interesting, one must know something the audience doesn’t: having a Learning in Depth° project will mean they forever have new exciting things to share.
As hinted at above, public speaking is sort of a giant tortilla chip for the queso con carne of Teaching Deliberate Practice° (September 18) and Giving Immediate Feedback°.
I suspect that some of the habits we inculcate in writing — Strong Sentences°, Story Ingredients°, the Moves of Disagreement° — will have an effect in the sorts of formal language that flows from kids’ mouths.
And (of course) this is the single best way we can help students with Unraveling Fears°.
Afterword:
If you haven’t voted in the “should these posts have more fun tangents, or less?” poll, you can still do so for the next couple days. The results so far have honestly been surprising. And another reminder that I’ll be out of town for the next couple weeks to see the eclipse,4 so expect me to be late with posts.
I’m getting crazy strong flashbacks right now to my seventh grade science class when, to build “presentation skills”, Mr. Nagy had the whole class take turns researching and presenting on the systems of the human body. When it came time to give our lesson we fell into a stable pattern: the student at the front of class would mumble something, everyone would try to write it down, someone would ask them to repeat it, they’d mumble something again, and then five weeks passed and I have no other memories of this time.
And if yours isn’t, please don’t feel the need to invite me over.
I owe my speaking skills to it. On my 30th birthday I gave my first conference presentation; in the front row were a noted historian, the man who gave one of the most-watched TED talks ever, and the guy who killed the dinosaurs. I shook, I stammered, I read my notes verbatim, I vowed I would never do it again. The next month, I gave my first speech in a local Toastmasters group.
Oh, you’ve heard the eclipse only lasts for 4 minutes 28 seconds, max? Maybe the solar eclipse you’re going to. We science teachers get invited to this super-special eclipse that lasts the better part of a fortnight. It’s a nice perk.
They’re not exactly speeches (for Science is WEIRD classes). More like idea-generation to continue the lesson at somewhat controlled points.
This makes me wonder about exempting kids permanently from certain subjects that are essentially optional in real life. I wonder if there's an Egan answer for this. If certain kids want to avoid public speaking for all time and don't want to be taught the somewhat particular skills of public speaking as we understand it (standing in front of a group of people who are giving you their attention because of some social contract), then could they just be exempted? I guess what I'm wondering about is if there is such a thing as an elective and maybe more broadly speaking, maybe there's good to be found in not forcing a kid to learn something that they don't want to learn.