Posting 6

We are at the stage where students are preparing their speeches to justify why their personally preferred topic should be the one which we explore together. I started off by asking them what a really good, "excellence" speech would look like. They have a high standard of themselves, which is great, suggesting that a good speech would include the following:

Good presentation

A clear voice
Looking at the audience
Not talking too fast

Good content

An interesting opening
An explanation of why the issue is important
What they could do about it
Good structure
Suggestions for what we could do to make learning about the issue interesting
An explanation for how it relates to them

I don't think we need any rubrics here! They have set the bar at excellence - why would you want to aim for less? Our obsession with 'grading', 'marking' or 'scoring' - all violent metaphors, is bizarre. I do like the idea of asking students after they have done their speeches who they thought gave the best ones and why. And, of course, it would a useful exercise to have all students write about how they thought they went at reaching the bar they set. I also think it would be good to extend their ideas about what a good speech entails, eg, good use of supporting illustrations, weighing up options, predicting possible consequences of certain actions. Today one class spent the first 20 minutes silently free writing about their speech and the other class the first 30 minutes, when I had asked for 5 minutes. Maybe all that work with the cameras paid off after all...?

Students are still having trouble with finding a focus though - I don't yet know how widespread it is. For example, one group wanted to tackle littering. After a few questions they talked about how there is so much rubbish around the war memorial. Suddenly we had a manageable problem; the disregard people hold for the National War memorial. That could lead to documenting the problem, learning about why the Memorial is important/what it represents etc and ideas for what we could do about it. That kind of thinking though is really hard. It is the disposition of inquiry and requires more than a technical, strategy-based, step-by-step approach to develop, as useful as some strategies are.