Let’s all teach public speaking

We have long upheld the voice at Nightingale. Our website states proudly, “Being a Nightingale girl means that, no matter what you want to say to the world, you have the knowledge, skills, and confidence to say it.” As teachers, we help students find the frequency at which their voices resonate most brilliantly.

This metaphorical voice work is complemented by practice given at every age to the actual, physical voice: presentations in the early grades give way to middle school project reports and eventually the senior-year ISP program. In between there is an abundance of daily, verbal engagement in every classroom—not to mention cherished music and theater experiences.

Despite all this practice, many girls arrive in the public speaking course during their junior year acting as though they are starting from zero. As though “public speaking” is not just frightening, but foreign. Their attitude belies some skills they already exercise—watch our students presenting at an admissions open house and you’ll see eloquent and self-possessed speakers. But this disconnect reveals a missed opportunity.

Imagine how much stronger our students’ voices would be if we could unify these bright but discrete speaking opportunities. Imagine if each student could develop a set of analytical and physical skills that built upon (and informed) 13 years of experiences. With a cohesive philosophy of good speaking, with attendant vocabulary and expectations shared in every discipline and at every age, our students would graduate with stronger voices, clearer ideas, and greater confidence.

A philosophy of speaking

A fundamental truth: public speaking is no different from regular speech. Yes, standing in front of 3,000 people affects you physically and psychologically in ways that sitting with four people won’t, yet success is defined the same way: Did they understand you?

The tools are identical, too. Making eye contact with someone in a classroom is just as valuable as when addressing a whole division; using good diction so your audience can understand the words coming out of your mouth is as important with three colleagues in a hallway as it is during a boardroom presentation. One might use these tools differently depending on the context, but a person’s success as a communicator is dependent on her fluency with them.

The very term “public speaking” is actually a little redundant; all speaking is public.^[1] I wonder if, by including the adjective, we reinforce the misconception that it requires special treatment? Put another way, we might say that “public speaking” does not refer to a specific situation and it has no rules. (This might be a useful moment to distinguish “public speaking” from “debate”: both celebrate strong voices, but debate is a very specific structure of engagement with its own rules and vocabulary.) Despite the fact that we consider the junior public speaking course part of the English department, public speaking actually represents a set of discipline-agnostic skills that our girls should practice in all situations—and in all classrooms.

The tools of speaking

What skills contribute to one’s success as a communicator? At the beginning of each year, I ask students to develop a list, and while the specific words vary from year to year, they usually come up with these basic parts:

While we hope to convey intangibles like confidence, charisma, and engagement, the attributes listed above are practical tools we have at our disposal. Those in the “body” section are usually the easiest for students to identify. The “mind” section often surprises them, but I maintain that a great speaker is useless without good content (just watch C-SPAN).

Like a great paper, a great presentation requires clarity of ideas. Can a reader follow the thread of the idea? Is it well supported? Has the author stripped away as much as possible so as to leave only the clearest form of her idea? Good speaking—whether in a seminar discussion or a formal speech—means conveying ideas clearly and concisely, an act made harder because the listener can’t re-read like they can with text.

Once students develop their list, we examine speeches through each lens: How did a speaker’s rhythm affect the audience? How about her posture or energy? How did a speaker organize his presentation and how did it help or hinder the audience’s understanding? The list not only allows us to be systematic about our analysis, but because it provides a shared vocabulary, it supports the girls as they begin to critique each other’s speaking.^[2]

The “how” in these questions matters. These are universal tools applicable to countless situations, so there is no right or wrong way to use them. We can’t say simply “she made eye contact” and assume that’s good. It is about controlling how you make eye contact, knowing when to look at your audience and when averting your eyes might be more effective.

Or: ask a friend or colleague if humor is useful in a speech and they’ll likely say “yes.” Now ask that friend or colleague if humor is appropriate for a president to use immediately after a national disaster...

That’s why we talk about fluency: knowing when and how to use these tools appropriately for each situation—not just being generically “good” at them.

It’s also why we spend our energies on a wide range of experiences. We practice giving formal speeches and extemporaneous readings, instructional explanations and persuasive pleas. We practice speaking with a lectern and without, seated and standing. We even rearrange the furniture frequently so as not to get tied into one way of engaging a room.

Speaking as a craft

Two vital points shape our conception of speaking.

First, everyone can become a great speaker; these skills are not innate. Some may have more natural comfort, others better at organization or structure, but anyone can practice and develop these skills. In fact, I believe that practice is the only thing that separates a weak speaker from an orator so strong she leaves her audience in awe.

We recently moved from pass-fail to letter grades, so as to offer clearer feedback and acknowledgment of the class’s rigor. Some, though, worried: How can you grade something so personal and scary?

The answer lies in the aforementioned centrality of practice. We respect presentation anxiety and work to ease it, but 50% of the grade is straightforward preparatory work. If a student works hard, she’ll succeed—and isn’t that true of all disciplines? (The remainder of the grade is distributed among the strength of each actual presentation—we are, after all, more than a speechwriting class—in-class participation, and a capstone speech through which each student demonstrates the full breadth of their learning.)

That concern about speaking being so personal is understandable, of course. We are metaphorically alone when speaking, sharing our own ideas, using our own personal voice. Everyone has a pencil, but only you have your voice. This is why many fear “public speaking” more than math or history, why students are initially hesitant to critique peers, and why missteps in speaking can feel worse than other errors.

We cultivate a safe atmosphere in our class where students feel comfortable trying new things, being unsteady, falling down. But the greatest work we do is to commit wholeheartedly to the paradigm that speaker and speech are separate.

This is the second vital point that we need to keep in mind about public speaking. We are not our work. It is hard to separate sometimes, for all the personal reasons mentioned above, but speaking is a craft. Like building furniture or writing an essay or playing the trumpet, our work comes from us but does not define us. I ask students to work hard and take pride in their presentations, but speaking is a skill to hone, not a defining feature of our identity.

Once we embrace this separation, mistakes cease being referenda on our worth and become merely and vitally opportunities to grow.

Of course we’ll flub things, of course we’ll lose our train of thought, of course we will sneeze or freeze before an unexpected question. That’s okay, though, because 1) these are things we do, not who we are; and 2) with practice and learning from mistakes, we will get better.

Let’s all teach public speaking

Not every educator feels comfortable speaking in front of people, let alone teaching others how to do it. As a result, it would be unreasonable for me to ask everyone to teach good speaking in their classes—almost as unreasonable as asking faculty who are already strapped for time with their existing curricula to add another facet to their classes.

Call me unreasonable.

While I’m proud of our public speaking course and love that we require it for graduation, our commitment to developing the voice can’t rest entirely on this 40-minutes-per-week endeavor. It must be embodied in the expectations we place on students every day.

I’m suggesting we agree on a set of tools and philosophies about speaking—what I’ve outlined above is merely a place to start—in order to bring developmentally appropriate expectations and vocabulary into the work we are already doing. To demand appropriate diction and volume and posture, while also explaining to students consistently why those matter. To begin analysis early, helping students consider what makes speeches effective long before graduation. To use the same frameworks across grades and disciplines, providing systemic reinforcement throughout their school experience.

Above all, I’m suggesting we stop segregating “public speaking” to a single course in the students’ penultimate year. We could create a model that provides girls such prevalent and varied opportunities to practice, that the idea of “public speaking” becomes no more daunting than asking a question in class or sharing a success with a friend. A model that convinces students that the best skills they display during a science presentation or a family heritage report are the same ones that will benefit them every moment of their lives.