Nerves:

If you’re nervous, you’re not going to perform at your best. The best thing to do is to rehearse your speech as much as you can so that you know it can go well, and you will gain confidence by doing this. Also, on the day you are due to give your speech, if you feel yourself becoming nervous, take some deep breaths, breathing in for six seconds, holding your breath for six seconds then breathing out slowly for twelve seconds. This should slow down your heartrate and therefore make you much less nervous. Nerves are natural though, and you wouldn’t be able to perform at your best without them.

Preparation:

The best way to perform at your best is to over prepare. Write your speech and rehearse it in several conditions, including a few with music playing or other background noise. That way, you will know that you can still deliver your speech with other distractions that you might come across on the day that you hadn’t planned for.

Visual Aids:

With any speech or presentation, the audience needs something to look at as well as something to listen to. This can either be handouts or a computer slideshow. Either way, don’t fall into the trap or simply displaying what you’re going to say, word for word. Better speeches will includes pictures of what you’re trying to descibe, or maybe small bullet points for people to have a look at. If you provide these at the end of your presentation, people will then be able to contact you with any questions that they might have had during the speech.

Body Language:

When people are nervous, they tend to either play with their hair, jewellery or clothing. To prevent yourself from doing this, try to keep your hands occupied with hand gestures. These must be pre-planned so that you don’t end up overdoing it and looking silly. You could also have something to hold so that your hands are busy, but remember that whatever you do other than your speech will attract people’s attention elsewhere, so it’s best to try not to do it.

Speech Fluency:

If you are constantly saying ‘erm’ or stuttering over your words, people may begin to lose interest, as it might not seem as though you know very much about your topic. To prevent yourself from doing this, write a speech, learn it, and try to stick to it. You need to be confident with what you have to say, otherwise you’re more than likely to fill any gaps that you might have in your speech with ‘erms’ or other non-fluency devices.

Topic:

You might not have that much of a choice about which topic you wish to do your speech on, but you will have a choice about what information you present from within that topic. You need to think about who will be listening to your speech. If you are a teacher in a secondary school, then it’s more than likely that your audience won’t need to know absolutely everything that you know about the subject. If you’re lecturing in a university, students might already have a certain level of understanding about the subject, therefore meaning that you would be able to include more than you would have been able to for another audience.

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When you give a lecture in Higher Education, you are often talking to at least two classes of students, often many more. For example, I lecture to groups of between seventy and 200 students. It’s a good way of getting a lot of information over to a lot of people very quickly. 

However, having said that, the bigger the crowd, the slower you have to speak, in fact, even if you are wearing a microphone. Each member of the audience needs to feel that you are engaging with them. You need to get some eye contact even with the outer edges of the back row.

Also, I find, you’re mainly giving them a snippet of information and then pointers to where they can find out much more information about the given topic.

I generally start off with an introduction, outlining what I am going to talk about. For an hour’s lecture – which is actually fifty minutes long, in fact, because you have to finish ten minute before the hour – I like to have about five sections, leaving just under ten minutes each. The last section is usually a set of questions which students should be able to answer if they have understood the lecture.

I use a variety of media: my voice, PowerPoint, handouts and also occasionally movie clips, sound files and web pages. However, the lecture must be deliverable even if the technology fails. All of the materials are then available on BlackBoard, our Virtual Learning Environment. These various forms have slightly different content, though they cross-reference and build towards a harmonious whole. I also make sure that the students who attend the lecture are rewarded – I tell them something there and then that is not made available any other way. Sometimes that may just be a joke. Other times it is a really thought-provoking piece of information.  

As I deliver the lecture, I have notes, very similar to my PowerPoint presentation. However, I have the extra information added on and the timings. Oddly one big lecture theatre I work in does not have a clock facing the lecturer. A sin! The smaller one does.    

It’s actually a very satisfying creative exercise, preparing for a lecture. Delivering it is also fun, if you’re well prepared.     

It may seem odd that students of such a young age are able to complete such large tasks and acting in such a mature manner to complete such a seemingly difficult project, however the teachers have done most of the prep work ahead of time to aid in the student’s research. There are websites already linked onto the computer so that students can view age-appropriate materials and resources.

The project took four weeks of lesson time spent largely in a self-guided setting so that the teacher could monitor all students to document levels of individual progress while keeping the entire class on course to accomplish their goals.  The students first do research using both off and online resources then they must present findings to the class. Again, don’t forget this is in the 3rd grade!

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Once the class reviews the research, individual students began preparing their projects with the new information. The teachers who developed the plan encouraged the students to use multimedia presentations on the computer for their final portion of the project and utilized class time to help them learn the basics of copying and pasting pictures from the internet into Microsoft PowerPoint.

It really was a tremendous undertaking for those teachers, but let’s not take anything away from the kids! It shows us that even in the 3rd grade, if we believe in the children and give them a chance to succeed, they might surprise us!