Friday, December 16, 2016

Speaking with Confidence

Take a moment to think about something you are exceptionally confident in your ability to do. Odds are you have practiced this time and time again.  Odds are, with your experience, you have successfully completed this task or performed this skill a number of times already.

Whether you're an athlete in competition, a doctor in surgery, or an attorney delivering the closing argument, your confidence improves with practice and experience.

The very same is true of speaking.  And so this week I combined a hands-on classroom activity with a techtool website called Let'sRecap.

My classroom activity had my students up and out of their seats, excitedly wandering the classroom while engaging with their classmates.  The timing could not have been better.  Winter Break is just around the corner and students are as giddy as a toddler on Christmas Eve.

Ultimately, if the lesson went perfectly, it was my goal that students would not only understand new concepts, they would also be able to explain these new concepts using academic language.  And this is where www.LetsRecap.com comes in.

With www.LetsRecap.com, I created a reflection assignment for my students that video-recorded their verbal responses.  I chose to limit their responses to only 15 seconds, which forced students to be concise in their response and created less grading burden on me as their teacher.

I believe it's important that education and athletics be dynamic.  Certainly content/ skill knowledge is important.  But perhaps more important are the abilities to read and comprehend, write with proper sentence structure, and speak using proper grammar, tonal fluctuations and eye contact.

LetsRecap allowed my students to practice speaking in their own chosen low-stress environment; and I found students did well to take advantage of this.  Most notably was one student who recorded himself dressed in a Tigger costume and sunglasses!

1 comment:

  1. Confidence will bring good positive changes in our personality and able to boost our performance. We must need confidence in our speaking power so that we can easily improve our leadership skills and attitude. It is essential to improve our own confidence skills so that we can easily deal with problems and boost our performance. Thanks for providing such important points that help to improve our confidence level.

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