School Spirit

Alongside your usual suspects of Reading and Writing in the English curriculum, there’s a third partner in crime. Actually, call them partners. There’s two of them. Speaking and Listening. They’re grouped together as one third of the English curriculum we have to report on to the parents in our twice yearly reports. Can your kid talk and can your kid listen.

Usually I’m tempted to respond to this one with one sentence.

‘Yes, he can talk. No, he won’t listen.‘

But I’d probably get in trouble for that, eh?

Anyway, as we’re writing the kids’ mid year reports at the moment, our 3/4 Unit set all our kids a homework task this week. A one minute prepared talk on their favourite place. This may prove a useful post for anyone searching on ideas for assessment tasks for Speaking and Listening at any stage. The topic of course could be altered to fit the required topics, but the way we structured the assessment may be of interest all the same.

In our grade we held them each afternoon as the kids brought them in. On Friday we did everyone who was left, and if they hadn’t prepared anything they sat up the front and rabbitted on about whatever came into their head.

Kids can be really good at that, eh?

I should really give credit where it’s due though. Just about all of them did a top little job of their talks. Only about a fifth of them read from notes, and one or two of those only used them as cues. The rest rattled it all off from within their heads and generally gave a good account of themselves. The shyest kid in the grade actually got up to do his first.

He didn’t really want to, but he was the only kid on Tuesday who was ready. He then spent the rest of the week kicking back knowing he didn’t have to do it again!

Here’s how we ran these Speaking and Listening assessment pieces. The kids would be ranked either ‘Just Satisfactory‘, ‘Good‘ or ‘Excellent‘ on three categories, depending on what particular traits they showed in their speech. The three categories were ‘Presentation‘, ‘Content‘ and ‘Audience‘.

Presentation and Content were pretty straight forward. If they read straight off their notes, they were just satisfactory - if they did it all from memory then they landed in Excellent. If their voice was quiet and mumbled, not so good, if they could go toe to toe in a conversation with the Queen, excellent. If their information was short, quick and pointless, duds - if it was entertaining and detailed, great job. And so on.

Audience was a little tricker. That came to answering questions from the grade as well as how attentive they were. If you were early in the list to present on an afternoon, the audience was better behaved. If you were the eighth person, the audience was getting ratty. I had to go easier on the later kids, eh?

Overall though it was a great success. I’ve told the kids plenty of times that the only thing holding us right back is the fact that they all love to talk, even and especially when they’re really not supposed to. That in mind though, it’s no real surprise at all that they generally all did really well with an assessment piece that was, essentially, talking.

It was quite amusing listening, too. We heard about your usual suspects for favourite places such as Lakes Entrance, Queensland, Merimbula and various holiday places. But we also heard about such more private and intimate places like ‘My Bedroom’, ‘Nan’s Kitchen’ and ‘My mate’s house ‘cos it’s got this wicked as dirt pile bike jump in the front yard! WICKED SICK, EH?’

Honestly, they’re a bunch of little showmen, the whole lot of them!

The kids weren’t required at school today. We had another professional development day. In fact, we had the first of a four part series of professional development sessions, the last three of which will take place over the next three Wednesday afternoons after school. It was about recognising language learning difficulties and the current ‘best practice’ way to teach around them. Bits and pieces of it were worthwhile, but that’s not really the purpose of this post. Instead, I’m focusing on the teacher’s voice.

The voice the teacher uses when actually teaching and interacting with the kids.

One of the presenters today spoke to us all the way through with her teacher voice. It was vibrant, it was active, it varied in pitch, it over dramatised expression to promote interest.

In short, it got annoying really fast.

Honestly, it was like being back at home in the early 80s watching Romper Room on telly. I really felt as though I was being condescended to by this (granted, very well-meaning) teacher presenting parts of this session by the way she was speaking to us all through the day. It put me in mind of the way my mum used to read books to me when I was two or three, lots of exaggerated expression and over-the-top voices. Which was fine when I was two or three listening to mum read ‘The Pokey Little Puppy’ Golden Book.

It started me thinking about the way I talk to the kids in my grade each day. I’ve got the same level as this presenter, except that she’d come from teaching prep kids the years before. I know it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t stand or sit there in front of them all and rabbit on in this forced teacher voice all day and expect the kids to take me seriously! I know it wouldn’t work because there are times when, for a bit of a laugh, I’ve put on this particular style of teacher voice for certain lessons just to see the effect.

The kids generally just nod their heads lower, look up at me from beneath crooked eyebrows with wry little smiles and say things along the lines of ‘you’ve gotta be kidding us, Mr V’.

Yup. Kids don’t like being condescended to.

Which has left me wondering about it, because apparently all the kids at her own school adore her BECAUSE OF THE WAY SHE SPEAKS TO THEM!

I suppose there’s just different ways of doing things, eh? I guess the kids I work with (who’ve known me for several years already just coming up through the school) expect just the face I’ve always shown and not anything I’m not. This particular person presents to the kids in this way, with this voice and approach, and the kids recognise it as her way of teaching. I rock up and talk to the kids like I’d talk to just about anybody (which usually means pulling their leg several times during the day, granted), and they appreciate me for sticking with who I am.

While such a voice seems to work for others, I just can’t see myself changing my style of delivery. I reckon tomorrow I’ll just keep doing as I have, give them a high-five as they walk inside in the morning and a ‘g’day, Ugly’ by way of greeting and get on with it.

Kids aren’t dumb. They recognise quickly when you’re not shooting straight.