How to Speak so People Listen

“How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world?” This is the question of Julian Treasure. In this TED talk, Treasure brings up multiple points of effective speaking. These points include seven deadly sins of speaking, HAIL, and a toolbox for teaching.

The seven deadly sins of speaking are things you should avoid when speaking to others. These include gossiping, judging, negativity, complaining, excuses, lying, and dogmatism. These seven things are said to be uninteresting and rude by Treasure. When practicing speaking, these things should be avoided because they are not relevant to the point you are trying to make. You need to be reliable when you are speaking and if you use these terms that takes away your reliability.

The next thing that Treasure talks about is HAIL. HAIL is the way you should speak or things you should include when speaking. HAIL has 4 different points. H stands for honesty, A stands for authenticity, I stands for integrity, and L stands for love. Of course no person is able to be honest or show love their entire life but you need to make sure you use these points when it matters!

One of the last things Treasure brings up is the toolbox for speaking. The first tool is register. Register is the connection that you have with the other person. When speaking, you want to make sure you have the audiences attention. Treasure brings up a great point that we tend to be more attracted to someone with a low voice. Lower voice is equal to power. The second thing is timbre. This is the way your voice feels. Most people enjoy listening to a voice that is smooth and rich. Prosody is the next point and this is the way you speak to show a meaning in your words. It gives your voice a variety so you do not sound monotone. Next is pace, how fast you speak. Then pitch (how high or low your voice sounds) and volume (how loud or quiet your voice is). These are just a couple of effective techniques so that when you speak you will get the attention you deserve.

Overall, Treasure’s TED talk gave great tips to make an effective speaker. Treasure also end with some exercises to warm up your voice before giving a speech. If you’d like to see them, I highly recommend watching this talk!

-Rachel

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Passion-Based Learning

School is standardized.  Learning is personal. How often is this true? After reading “School vs. Learning” by George Couros, it really gets you to think about the differences. If you remember Robinson’s TED talk about school kills creativity, this talk ties directly into this article. Are students able to express themselves through creativity in such a “demanding” environment? This all goes back to passion-based learning.

Passion-based learning is a way for students to learn threw expressing their passions. When expressing their passions, students are able to focus and participate in the lessons. Now, there can be some students that do not know what they are passionate about. I didn’t know until about 6th grade. If you want to use passion-based learning but have young students with no clue about passions, Ainissa Ramirez has two tips from the article “Passion-Based Learning” to help you out. The first tip is “finding out what each child is innately passionate about” and the second is “be an instructor that exudes passion for the topic, and infect your students with that excitement”. These tips are great and really show that students are going to follow by example. If you show passion in teaching, students will show passion in schoolwork.

The second article I picked is by Sage Briggs and it is about 25 ways to institute passion-based learning in the classroom. Students are going to follow by example but these are just some tips to ensure that you are participating in passion-based learning. Since there is 25, I am only going to talk about my favorite. The first I will talk about is “letting students express their passions”. This is so important. If a student feel that they can not be themselves or show their passions, this will take a huge toll on their confidence. This also allows the student freedom in their assignments as well as more effort put into the assignments. Something else Briggs wrote was “treat all passions equally”. The passion a student has is pretty much their personality, if you criticize their passion that is a major take down to their personality. This brings up the old saying “treat others how you want to be treated”. If someone came up to you and said something you loved doing was stupid or wrong, you would feel terrible for liking it. This is even worse with kids. In my opinion, the best thing you can do is treat all your students equally.

In conclusion, these articles were a good read for future teachers.

-Rachel