essay. Taming Lions: The persuasive oral in the classroom

Adrian has taught in New Zealand and Australia over the past thirty years. He and Kevin Ryan have developed the Speak Well? Of course you can!!! programme. Schools adopting this highly successful programme have seen very significant improvements in students’ speaking skills.

For most teenagers, needing a teacher to impart the skills of persuasion is like a wild lion needing a lion-tamer to teach it to hunt. Just ask their parents. For years, their children have been very successfully practising the skills of persuasion – at their expense! Does this mean that the Persuasive Oral is a waste of time? No, exactly the opposite!

The Persuasive Oral has the potential of being one of the most valuable units of work in the curriculum; but, it’s not about teaching students what ‘persuasion’ is. It’s about helping them understand these skills (that they are already using) and how to apply them to topics other than getting their own way, and to audiences other than their parents. Once mastered, this becomes a highly-prized life skill because it combines the strengths of not only being able to confidently address a group; but also the ability to influence the way they think or act. This is why speech teachers and coaches consider the persuasive speech to be the highest form of the art.

Now, let’s look at this in its two main components: writing the presentation then delivering it.

Writing the presentation

As mentioned in the opening, the teaching of the principles of persuasion probably needs to be little more than a deconstruction of how they interact with their parents when trying to ‘get their way’. While they understand instinctively what appeals to their parents; they now need to understand what will appeal to a group. We label that ‘audience analysis’. In this case, the actual audience is their peers – although you can change that if you want to push them to research wider than their own demographic. Being very clear about what audience is being addressed is so important. Students need to understand this before they can start work. It will probably affect their choice of topic (if they are given this option). The first step in the actual process should be to identify what factors appeal to their given audience – their ‘motivators’.

Around one of these factors they will write their key message — the main benefit for this audience if they agree to do as the speaker asks. This may form the ‘hook’ that will grab their audience in the opening and the ‘carrot’ that will motivate them to action in the conclusion.

Early in the presentation they will need to articulate the ‘problem’ – that is, why the status-quo needs to change. This will be followed by their explanation of the solution with details about what they, the audience, can do about it. The benefits need to be confidently and forcefully promoted – juxtaposed with a clear ‘call to action’.

Delivering the presentation

To be effective, the delivery of a persuasive oral should use minimal notes. Trying to persuade anyone – individual or group – while constantly checking your notes simply doesn’t work. It makes the speaker look unconvinced…and unconvincing. This does not mean that notes for referral about facts and figures are not appropriate – but when it comes to persuading them to act, you must be eye-balling them!

In our experience, this presents the greatest dilemma for most students. They worry that if they leave something out they will be marked down – so their primary motivation is to avoid this; where it should be to connect with and persuade their audience.

In a unit of work we have developed, students do prepare, write-out and show their speech to the teacher; but this happens two weeks before they deliver it. The purpose of checking it is to confirm that the student has addressed all the necessary criteria for a persuasive speech and utilised any of the techniques they were taught. When assessing the actual presentation, the teacher has only the assessment sheet to refer to. This way they are able to concentrate totally on how well the student engages the audience and how likely this audience would be to take the required action at the end of the presentation. Anything else is secondary.

If a student feels that they need to check their notes – just to make sure that they haven’t left anything out – then they have been shackled with an unnecessary task. I have spoken to many students about this subject over the years and the consistent message we get is “if the teacher has my speech in front of them, then I need to make sure I don’t leave anything out”.

Students should still be encouraged to take notes into the presentation; but they need to know how to create useable notes. If this has not been addressed in some previous oral studies, it should be included with the unit of work.

Which topic?

You will give your students the best chance of success if they are guided towards a topic about which they:
• are already knowledgeable or can quickly become so.
• can develop a clear link with, and benefit for, their audience.
• have a genuine interest, concern or strongly held point of view.

Which audience?

The easy option is their ‘real’ audience – their peers/classmates. The danger is that because it requires so little effort with your peers, they will under-value this step. Choosing a hypothetical audience (parents, the school community, a particular industry group) forces them to identify what issues are important and priorities are relevant to other individuals. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the easy option – as long as it is emphasised to students that identifying the motivators that a group of individuals (which, after all, is what an audience is) have in common is an essential first step in any persuasive presentation.

When you set students loose on a task asking them to be passionate and persuasive, it might feel like you’ve ‘set the lions loose’. Provided with the correct guidance and strategies, this is an assignment at which students can gain a really valuable life-skill while and, at the same time, identify something about which they really care.
Get ready for some surprises!