Women's Day Public Speaking

If at first Covid-19 cancels you...go bigger!

We organized, prepared, and practiced for a Women's Day Public Speaking Event that was cancelled by city authorities hours before it opened for the public due to the initial wave of Covid-19. Despite this, it was considered a great success by everyone involved.

Now that Covid-19 restrictions are beginning to ease and public cultural events are on the table again, we have begun planning our next Women's Day Public Speaking Event. With a longer lead time, we can expand the event into a five month learning project. Participation will be opened up to all students fifteen years old and up with the oration clubs (Public Speaking, Ted Talks, and Toastmasters) heavily promoted to.

The topic for presentations will be "Who is someone that inspired you, is your hero, or is a role-model to you?"

The invited judges will be strong women who are pillars of the community and can inspire young women to reach for their dreams.

• Meryem Bennis, director of Calliope bookstore

• Soukaina Fahsi, international singer born in El Jadida

• Leila Slimani, internationally published Moroccan author

• Merieme Chadid, NASA astronaut

• Michelle Outlaw, director of Dar America

We are looking at a tentative date of 11 March for the public speaking presentation. The event will be open to the general public with special guests invited from the Pasha's office, the board of our association, the head of the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences at the local university, and our public speaking event partners from ENCG.

Scoring

It makes sense to start off a speaking competition by having everyone choose their topics. We're not starting off that way. We're keeping the event open to English speakers of all levels and want to both encourage Beginning students and give them a fair chance competing against Advanced students. After all, the purpose of the event isn't to show off student English abilities but to celebrate Women's Day.

To keep things fair and so students can make informed decisions, they will be presented with the final scoring rubric the judges will be using and how they can earn bonus points.

The judges will use the following rubric when scoring the presentations. The focus is on management of the material and performance. These are skills that carryover into any language and are useful no matter the profession a student pursues.

Criteria	0 points	1 point	2 points	3 points
Presentation is well organized	No apparent logical order of presentation, unclear focus	Content is loosely connected, transitions lack clarity	Sequence of information is well-organized for the most part, but more clarity with transitions is needed	Development of logic is clear; transitions are clear and create a succinct and even flow
Incorporates examples and stories	No stories or examples that stand out	Examples presented as a list of items with no attempt to grab audience interest or make engaging	Some use of examples and stories with mild interest but not highly engaging	Exceptional originality of stories and examples
Strong or compelling argument	Thesis is unclear and information appears randomly chosen	Thesis is clear, but supporting information is disconnected	Information relates to a clear thesis; many relevant points, but they are somewhat unstructured	Exceptional use of material that clearly relates to a focused thesis; abundance of various supporting materials
Speaking skills (use of tone, speed, and volume)	Monotone; speaker seemed uninterested in material	Little eye contact; fast speaking rate, little expressions, mumbling	Clear articulation of ideas but apparently lacks confidence with material	Exceptional confidence with material displayed through poise, clear articulations, eye contact, and enthusiasm
Natural and appropriate movements and gestures, not stiff	Speaker stays in one place and does not move	Some movement or gestures but speakers appears stiff or nervous; movements or gestures are so distracting it is hard to focus on what they are saying	Speaker moves and gestures but it does not feel natural or is distracting	Movements appear natural and enhance or compliment

Morocco suffered under the yoke of colonialism and all that entails. I like to promote the presence of Moroccan culture at the school so our students can see positive representation of their culture and take pride in their culture and history. To support this, students who choose a Moroccan for their speaking topic will receive an extra eight points when scored.

The purpose of this event is to celebrate Women's Day and everything women have contributed to the world. To encourage this spirit while students research and present, an additional eight points will be awarded to anyone who chooses a woman to talk about. Seeing how there are many amazing Moroccan Women, this is, of course, cumulative with the extra points for choosing a Moroccan.

Pin the tail on the topic

No one will be turned away for the person they choose to speak about. They can choose to present any person: male or female, Moroccan or foreign, alive or dead. At the same time, we cannot have twelve people talking about the same person or the audience will get bored and fall asleep. We will use a first come first served system and, since every participant has email access and emails have a timestamp, participants will send us an email with their first choice for whom they wish to talk about. They will be encouraged to include a second or third choice in case their first was already taken.

What do you want to know and how to get there

Right out of the gate, we want to get the students used to thinking critically. We'll start with a large group brainstorming session about what they, the students want to know about the people being presented on. This will be kept general so the students will generate a list of questions that apply universally. The students will then break up into small groups.

The three oration clubs each have a different focus when it comes to public speaking. The Public Speaking club is used to planned formal presentations; Ted Talks focuses on analyzing and discussion of topical presentations; and Toastmasters specializes in impromptu talks with a quick analysis of relevant information to include. Members of these three clubs will be spread out amongst the small groups to share their knowledge and expertise.

The small groups will have a quick discussion about the questions they think are the most important to answer and the logical flow of a presentation before sharing their results with the class. The teacher will do a guided lesson using leading questions to cover anything that was missed.

Learning about the audience and visiting judges

An important part of any successful public speaking event is to know the audience. Something that gets an empathetic response from one audience can alienate another. We'll start a class with this question on the board for an open discussion: Who is the target audience? The students will have a few minutes to discuss (spoiler: it's the judges) and then we'll have an open discussion about the anticipated characteristics of the target audience.

Our judges are role models and pillars of the community. They will each visit and talk with our students either in person or over video using Discord or Zoom. Students will spend time preparing for the visits by working together to create a list of what they want to learn from the judges and what questions they will ask to achieve this. They will learn about their target audience (the judges) this way as they begin to prepare their presentations.

Discord is a wonderful communication tool for this project. Discussion channels can be created for each topic and each group. Video and audio chat rooms can be created at a moment's notice and the presentation feature will allow the students to practice their talks any time and any where.

Practice (with feedback) makes perfect

Regular live practice sessions will be held either in person or on streaming video for students to practice and get feedback. In the beginning, each practice session will target one thing for students to work on with the first being how to give feedback.

There are cultural issues in Morocco to take into account when teaching how to give feedback. People try not to say negative things about others out of a fear the person being talked about will get into trouble, be punished, etc. When you can get someone to give feedback, it's often taken to the opposite extreme and can come across as very cruel and mean spirited. For every feedback session, we will stress the idea of "if this was your presentation, what would you want others to tell you?"

To help students get used to giving constructive feedback, we'll start of by having them practice these methods:

• The 10-Minute Peer Feedback System: This critical friends approach begins with one student sharing their work while the other group members actively listen. It then moves into a chance to ask clarifying questions, get feedback, respond to feedback, and chart out next steps. Each of these stages lasts two-three minutes apiece. While that sounds fast, it can actually feel leisurely.

• Structured Feedback with Sentence Stems: Here, the teacher pre-teaches specific sentence stems that your students can use to provide diagnostic, clarifying, or critical feedback.

• 3-2-1 Structure: This is simple. Students provide three strengths, two areas of improvement and one question that they have.

• See-Think-Wonder: Students give peer feedback by pointing out what they see in a Ted Talk, what they think about it, and, finally, what questions they have.

• Peer Coaching: Students interview each other about the process, using the coaching questions from the student-teacher conferences to guide them if they struggle to come up with reflection questions.

As students become accustomed to giving and receiving feedback, everyone, teachers and students alike, will score presentations on the following rubric. It is designed to give constructive feedback to improve presentations, so the criteria judges will score on are present but scoring itself is not.

Suggestions	Criteria	Highlights
	Presentation is well organized
	Incorporates examples and stories
	Strong or compelling argument
	Speaking skills (Effective use of tone, speed, and volume)
	Natural and appropriate movements and gestures, not stiff

• Criteria are what presentations will be scored on by the judges and quantifiable things we want the students to learn.

• Suggestions are what students can ideas students can use to improve.

• Highlights are what students did very well and should be proud of.

Practice sessions won't be limited to just the official ones in class. Students will be encouraged to do live practice sessions on Discord to get more practice before a studio audience. Another option is posting videos to Flipgrid to get more responses over time, like if peers are not available for a live practice session. In case something unforeseen prevents in person practice sessions, the official ones can be held over Discord or Flipgrid as well.

Choosing what to rehash

There is an excellent feature in Discord that we use whenever we want to take an informal vote on something. Users can react to a message, selecting an option that adds a special emoji below the message. A channel can be set up for students to propose things to go over in class, like more time on writing hooks, and every student who is interested can do the same reaction to the message. This will let the teacher know what students are most concerned with while minimizing drawing public attention to shy students. The teacher can then decide if it would be better to do a large group lesson or small groups organized around different topics.

It's go time!

After five busy months it's finally time for students to present. Families, the school body, and special guests from El Jadida, the US Embassy, and the American Cultural Association will be invited to attend. The judges will be publicly welcomed and introduced to the audience followed by a short speech by the teachers in charge of each of the oration clubs. The students will then come out to be introduced and talk about someone that inspired them, is their hero, or is a role-model to them. While the judges are conferring about final scores, there will be a coffee break hosted by Maison Eric.

The scores will be announced and the winners will be awarded a prize kindly donated by Calliope. Normally, we would give both Calliope and Exchanges, our long-term partners for pedagogical materials, the option of donating to competition prizes but it seems better to have the company run by a woman donate the prizes to a Women's Day competition. The winners will also be invited to an encore presentation at the annual inter-ALC Face-Off competition where each school in our association showcases the accomplishments of their students.