Year 10 Speeches

 

I've just this minute finished teaching my Year 10's, who are in the middle of presenting their oral texts to the class.  This has been an interesting experience; one that has been quite different from similar tasks with my Year 9's.  

At our school, we stream in the Junior School.  My Year 9 is a top class, whilst Year 10 is middle.  I have mixed views on streaming - of course, there are positives and negatives for both.  But I would mostly argue and believe that while streaming is generally great for the top kids, it's not so much fun for the others.  I've been with classes who have said 'we're the cabbage class, miss', and others who know they are top and have an arrogance to boot. If you think of yourself as the 'cabbage class', how do you fly?  Do you even bother? It reminds me of a great TED talk I watched recently, in which a teacher described convincing a class that they were the best class (even though most believed they were not).  You can find Rita F. Pierson's talk 'Every kid needs a champion' here.

Whilst my Year 10's are not the so-called 'bottom' class, they know they're not the top.

For oral texts this year, I wanted to try what I had tried with my Year 9's - that is, opening up the floor to them to choose how to show me what they know.  After extensive teaching and discussion around presentations/speeches/oral texts, I asked them to put forward some suggestions.  I must say, they weren't that keen. Where Year 9 lapped up choice and offered several creative ways to present work, Year 10 almost shut down.  Not to be deterred, I reflected that perhaps that needed slightly narrower parameters to start to feel safe enough to offer up their suggestions.  So I limited it to: a TED talk scenario in class, a motivational talk by a coach or captain at half time, a pecha kucha presentation, or a good old fashioned speech on something they were interested in. We looked at lots of examples of each of these, and they all seemed quite interested.  I was looking forward to seeing what they would come up with.

All chose speeches. I guess it was safe.  But I wonder if, by streaming our classes, we don't allow all students to feel safe enough to creatively experiment. In the end, I want them to choose a format that they like (or, at the very least, have chosen!) but it's been a very interesting experience for me observing both my junior classes and their enthusiasm and reticence balanced equally on between both classes.  The only difference I can see is the streaming.