Coaching Student Performances

As Dr. W as noted several times in class, the literature for communication pedagogy spends a lot of time talking about instructional techniques, assessment, and other areas of teaching--but concentrates very little on the process of coaching students on their performances. Given the limited amount of time we spend with students in class, the tradition has been to tell students how to practice, then have them do it outside of class. The downside to this is that communication competencies are complex--and we rarely actually catch ourselves doing the things we need to fix.

Back when I was in high school, I had some serious issues with vocalized pauses: "umm," "like," and the ever-versatile "you know." My speech coach on my forensics team corrected this--per my request--by throwing objects at me every time I said one. This sort of hybrid of public speaking and dodgeball gave me an awareness of what I was doing, the reflectiveness to identify where I was doing it, and the control to eventually get better. More recently, I've done similarly sadistic things to students at a summer speech camp:

• Gesture too much? Have another student bind your arms with duct tape.
• Too fidgety? Speak with your back against the wall without moving any part of your body.
• Overuse of stock phrases? Everyone in the room has permission to throw balls of paper at you, which you are then required to pick up.
• Talking too fast? Deliver the speech so slowly it sounds like you're speaking whale like Dorie in Finding Nemo.
• Struggling to articulate? Try to talk with a pencil in your mouth.

Okay--I don't condone these things. These were kids who were incredibly eager to learn and were quite literally willing to jump through ridiculous hoops to get better. The point is to develop that sense of self-reflectiveness and self-critique that enables them to coach themselves to success. This means simple awareness of where they have shortcomings--and that sense of control. "If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball," the old adage goes. If you can speak without moving even a single part of you body, chances are you have enough self-control to use your hands only when it's appropriate.

Anyway, let's get down to business. So you want to coach your students on presentation skills. How to do it?

Consider your root causes.

As astute commentators have noted, discussions of body language can sometimes feel a bit surface-level and meaningless. Teaching this way in class can feel very mechanistic. It's important to realize that our students are people, that they're struggling with some of these skills for a reason, and that by tapping into those reasons we can better help them improve.

First of all, consider your common problems. You'll find that certain problems manifest more in some groups than in others. These include the whole gamut of elocutionist movement "intense study of human body movement" business: vocal variety, rate, tone, volume, projection; and non-verbal gesturing, eye contact, poise, purposefulness. Isolate what students in your class have particular trouble with. You can't fix it all at once and it's silly to try.

But don't just stop there. The problem is that we tend to teach these things in isolation. "You should gesture like this," we say. But we don't remember to tell them why. We discourage students from certain vocal and body language characteristics for a reason: they connote nervousness, uncertainty, ambivalence, or a lack of preparedness. Even if we tell them this, though, we don't dig into the reason why these bodily traits connote nervousness: our students are actually nervous, uncertain, and ambivalent. As we'll see in a moment, cultivating student confidence can often address and deal with a lot of these issues at once--much more effectively than just nit-picking one at a time.

Structure the class to facilitate coaching.

Let's say you plan in a coaching day before the Informative Briefing assignment. In order to maximize coaching time for students, I would advise against having everybody get up and deliver something to the whole class. Here's a suggestion for how I would structure the coaching day:

1) Require that students arrive with their speeches already prepared. You'll need to structure out assignment deadlines to guarantee this will happen.

2) First, review some of the key delivery concepts to refresh students on what they're looking for during the presentations. Highlight areas you know several of them have had trouble with. Address both content and delivery concerns.

3) Begin with 5 students getting in front of the class and delivering one small segment of the speech they feel comfortable with. After the first student, model for your class how you expect them to deliver feedback. Provide a short list of two to three "Positives" and two to three "Deltas" (areas for change) to the student, targeting those delivery areas you've noticed they need to improve on. [More on how to do this below.]

4) With students 2-5, gradually have the class give more and more feedback to the students that come forward. Cold call on students to share their feedback--and force them to be specific about details in the speech they observed.

5) Break students into groups of 3. Have them arrange their desks in a triangle formation so they can see each other. Have students go through two rounds of practice:

• Practice for Content. First, each student in the group practices delivering the entire speech from their chair, start to finish. As they do this, classmates will monitor for places where the student has holes in their structure, an unclear sentence, weaker transitions, a lack of research, and other issues. The purpose of this is to get content out of the way, and to give students a quick "practice" round where they sort out their thoughts. This will be a wake-up call to many students about how prepared they are, too.
• Practice for Delivery. Second, students now will rotate and take turns delivering the one part of their speech they feel most comfortable with to their classmates. They will stand up next to their desk and talk to classmates, while classmates record their Positives and Deltas. Afterward, they take turns sharing.

6) Reconvene as a class. Tell all students to write down one area of delivery and one area of content they will improve upon before their next presentation. Have them go around the room and share these. As the instructor, take note of what they've said. Tell them that when you grade their delivery, you'll in part be grading on their improvement in the specific area they highlighted.

The Content of Your Coaching

1) Make students comfortable. You don't want to make them feel intimidated or uneasy. Adopt a much more light-hearted persona than you have when, say, telling students to meet a bunch of deadlines.

2) Address specific things that students say and do. Don't just talk generally about "gesturing." Tie it to their message: "When you said that 'the left hand will know what the right hand is doing,' you inverted those two gestures. What effect does this have on the point you're trying to make?"

This is true across the board. When students recognize that their messages--the things they care about and want to communicate to their peers--are being undermined, they will quickly become more conscientious and in control of their bodies.

3) Be ornery. This might sound like it goes against the lighthearted point. But it does not. This is a tough love personality that you need to turn to when necessary. Sometimes, the nervousness needs to be addressed head-on. Tell the student: I know from your outline, from your research, from your conversations in class, that you deeply care about this. So show it! Speak up! Don't be afraid of this--you KNOW this! Students need affirmation of this kind. They need to be reminded that their voices matter.

It's too easy to let students get up, deliver something that's merely okay, or a bit lackluster, or a bit unconfident, and let it hang there, and say, "Good job." When a student mumbles, we need to tell them: speak up! I saw Jean channel this extremely well in class last week. When a student delivered a question with a lack of confidence, she made the student say it louder--and didn't let the student off the hook until he did so. 

The trick is that this requires a certain confidence on your part as the instructor. Don't be afraid to confront students about these things. Do it nicely, but it's better to head them off before the speech--instead of giving them some passive-aggressive feedback afterward that'll just make them protest. Let them know that you are serious about delivery; they will meet the bar.

4) Balance "Positives" and "Deltas." One of the best things you can do to balance the needs of light-heartedness with the needs of orneriness: Connect their strengths to their weaknesses. When you tell students to change something, make note of something they do well--and how they can leverage their skill to transcend their area of growth. 

5) Balance delivery and content. We too often conceptualize these things differently. Make sure your feedback addresses both--and how content impacts delivery and vice-versa.

Comments: What do you recommend for coaching students in class? How do you go about training students to reflect on their own delivery and construction of speeches? What other steps would you recommend for giving students opportunities to practice in class?

Preparing Students for the Mid-Term

One of the biggest challenges instructors in college run into is students complaining that they did not understand the expectations or parameters of an assignment. If you didn't say it, the story goes, it's not fair to grade them on it. While I don't fully back the students on this, I was an undergraduate once, too, and to some extent I sympathize.

For the first time in their lives, their days are not fully structured. Their instructors are not giving them study guides. Their reading must all be done outside of class. They don't have a study hall structured into their day for 70 minutes. They have tremendous freedom, but that time may be spent making a Gangnam Style parody video instead of preparing for their group presentation.

Okay. The point is, there might be a grain of reasonableness in their complaint. This is a post about how to acknowledge that grain of reasonableness and do your part to prep them.

1) Know roughly what your exam will look like early.

If you decide to assemble your exam three or four days ahead of time, you'll hate your life. First of all, you'll go into the test bank of questions and realize: Oh, no, these are all incredibly precise questions about terms from the chapters! Okay, you'll rationalize, I've been reminding them to read all semester. But still, there'll be this bit of guilt and uncertainty on your end, and a potential mutiny on their end. There are a million terms and concepts in the first ten chapters, and the majority of class time is devoted to activities designed to more deeply cultivate their understanding of particular key concepts. You need to think about what you're going to test in advance so you can at least help guide students' focus. You also need some idea of the format of the exam in advance, so you can give them a semblance of what to look for on it.

2) Write some exam questions after class.

When you get done teaching and walk back to your office, think about what you covered or recapped that day. Think about tricky concepts you clarified. Then, write a few test questions (or adapt a few from the test bank book) that you know fit with what you discussed. That way, you'll know that you definitely did address the material in some capacity when you test them on it later.

3) Or, write a quiz.

Put together a short quiz, worth low stakes, that is part of the students' participation grade. Base it on the reading before that day of class. Give it to them sort of abruptly, just to keep them on their toes. Make the quiz mirror the format of your exam, and tell them that it does. This should put the fear of God into them and make sure they stay on top of the reading. (Remember, you're battling the perception that the reading does not matter!)

4) Prep them on constructed response answers.

The thing about open-ended questions is that students can write anything. This is good; that means they can't just make a guess based on the four possible answers available. It also is good because they have to apply what they have learned, synthesize ideas, and do other more complex critical thinking stuff. But it's problematic if you do not give them some sense of what you are grading on.

Preparing them for this is as simple as creating an example constructed-response question and a sample answer, and dissecting the answer for them to go over the main components you're looking for. I did this in my class, and provided students a PowerPoint slide of some of my key expectations:

5) And yes, give them some heads up about content.

I give students at least some idea of what concepts will be covered. I know, I know. On Facebook I'm kvetching about them giving the question topics to presidential candidates in advance because that allows them to study specific topics and talking points and completely throw out others. But our students aren't running for president (thank God). They're preparing for one of several tests, and we're not the only instructors throwing a ton of content at them, telling them to synthesize it themselves from ten chapters of a fairly dense textbook, and having them go forth. Remember that they mostly have four other classes doing the same thing. We need to give at least a little guidance.

For me, that meant a PowerPoint slide (which I posted on ELMS--I didn't make them copy this whole thing, that'd be sadistic). I specifically told them, for the constructed response questions, what concepts they would need to apply from their viewing of the movie 12 Angry Men. This lets them know what to look for and take notes on. They don't know the actual questions in advance, but they at least know what they will need to write about, which--given that these students did have pretty solid GPAs in high school and ACT/SAT scores to get in here--should be sufficient to prepare them for the test.

6) Set expectations for the review day.

Require each student to bring a question for review day. Make it a participation grade. One thing that they don't understand. Forcing students to hunt for a topic that's too complicated for them to get it on their own is a good way to ensure that they gain at least a passing familiarity with a large subset of the chapters. Set it up so that their questions and thoughts facilitate the review, and then in the latter part of the class hit the important concepts that you're surprised nobody asked about.

7) Use the group presentations as exam question fodder.

A great way to get the student groups to pay attention to each other is to tell them that some of the content their classmates are covering in their presentations will show up on the exam. (The presentations are based on concepts from Chapters 1-10 anyway, so this just helps you with that process of focusing). This saves you some effort in that it helps you decide on five or six things to test them on; it gives them an incentive to support one another.

8) Set up the exam as an "attainable challenge."

Be straight up honest that it's going to be hard, and they need to study. They're at a great university; they should expect to take hard tests that don't just look at their conceptual knowledge, but also at their ability to apply and synthesize that knowledge. Tell them you make it hard because you believe they can do it, and that you've given them the tools they need to succeed on it. Now they simply need to meet you half way.