The Greater Princeton branch of AYLUS (GPA) has been working with middle school students on important public speaking skills. We designed the class for beginners with the desire to improve their speaking skills.
GPA member Alissa Wu teaches these classes and creates a schedule based on past roles and student preferences, updates her class spreadsheet, designs slideshows and activities, finds informational videos, and sends students speech feedback. Her class has 10 students, who spend most of the time doing speeches, but they also watch informational videos and do other class activities. She facilitates classes and guides each student as they gain experience within each of the meeting roles.
On June 11th (2 hrs), the class theme was “Technology.” The class started Project 6, which focuses on using vocal variety, volume, pace, pitch, and overall voice changes to improve the speaker’s message delivery. They then continued practicing impromptu speeches with questions centered on the theme, such as “What technologies do you think will become possible in the future?” Students would take a few seconds to think about the question, then give a 1-2 minute speech. After they finished, the teacher gave them feedback did, and pointers on what to improve. They’ve shown improvement in speech organization this week.
