Speaking and Listening in CCSS

Consider the two sides of communication: the SPEAKER and the LISTENER as you continue to massage your assignments and scheduling.

Because critical listening and useful commenting are skills of equal value to speaking well, I ask students to provide written feedback to each speaker.  To make it more efficient, we use a five day cycle with each student required to sign up to speak on date s/he prefers and to provide specific feedback on the days s/he does not speak.

I provide the same feedback chart I use for grading and each student focuses on just one feature each of the four days in the cycle.  The feedback sheets are collected, reviewed by me, stapled and returned to the speaker at the end of the round of speeches.

As an additional incentive to prepare and present well, I ask students to do three things on the day they present their speech in class.

• by midnight of the day before they give their speech in class, submit their written outline of the speech
• the day of their speech, sign-up on the board indicating the speaking order they prefer. (Usually one-five) Some students like to speak and get it over; others like to observe what others do before they speak.
• by midnight the day they give their speech in class, submit a self-evaluation along with the letter grade they believe they earned on the specific speech. If their grade is the same as mine, I raise their grade 1/2 step.  C+ becomes B-; B- becomes B; B+ becomes A-, etc.

I do not look at their self-evaluation or grade until after I’ve completed the grading and do not lower their grade if theirs is lower than mine.

A portion of each prepared speech grade is

• 20 % – On-time submission of speech outline/draft
• 15% – Feedback on drafts of classmate’s speech  (In-In class comments)
• 30% – FINAL sentence outline of own speech
• 30 % Presentation of own speech
• 5 % On-time submission of self-evaluation ( Self-Reflection after Personal Experience Speech
• Peer Feedback for INFORMATIVE SPEECH
• Sample Peer Response to Persuasive Evaluation
  Because the Common Core State Standards tend to equate speaking and listening and requires students to do both, taking a full week for presenting speeches seems to be good use of time.

Here’s a chart to help organize such a week.