Public-speaking helps kids stand up to bullies

Photo by Mikhail Nilov: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-group-of-children-laughing-at-a-boy-in-a-library-7929423/

Advantages of public-speaking for children include articulating their ideas more effectively, communicating with different audiences, and standing up for themselves.

How can public-speaking skills help a child deal with bullies. What’s the child supposed to do? Give a speech to the bully on why he or she should stop picking on others?

The biggest reason that developing public-speaking skills can help in this area actually doesn’t have to do with giving a speech.

Public-speaking is consistently ranked as the top fear for most people. Learning these skills at a young age before the fear has had a chance to become deeply ingrained is not only going to help the child perform better in the academic environment but is also going to help with social interaction. As children practice and improve their public-speaking skills, their confidence is also going to grow. They are going to find it easier to use their voices.

In this article, Can learning public-speaking help kids avoid ending up at the back of the line? — SHEILA NAZARI), I wrote that instead of first developing the confidence to learn public speaking, public-speaking should be viewed as a tool to help children develop confidence as they grow. School is basically a group setting, so an introvert, may view themselves as always doing some form of “public-speaking.” I wrote about how learning public-speaking skills at a young age would have made it easier for me to speak up to my peers in school settings where I wanted to say something but was afraid to use my voice.  

Public-speaking can help children develop confidence in themselves and their communication skills so that they can use their voice when needed.

When I was in the third grade, there was a girl who would ask to borrow my markers and then she would keep one for herself. This continued until I was down to half of the markers I had started with. I didn’t want to make a scene and tell her to give them back to me because I didn’t have the confidence to confront her and I was afraid of being overheard by others in the class. If I had developed my public-speaking skills by that age, I would’ve been more likely to speak up. I also wish that I had been able to use my voice to defend others who were being picked on.

For this reason, I felt called upon to write the book, Super Speaker, which teaches public-speaking via an entertaining fiction story through the eyes of Gia, a girl struggling to deal with the changes that come with starting middle school. In addition to the themes of public-speaking and friendship, there is also an anti-bullying theme. Gia, the main character, develops her speaking skills and uses her voice to stand up for kids who are being bullied. She is a multi-faceted character who turns into a bit of a bully herself in order to fit in and has to learn how to become herself and use her voice to help others. Practical public-speaking tips are intertwined into the story using my exclusive 5 P’s of Presentation model.

Read and review for free for a limited time: https://booksirens.com/book/RWUFPGK/MC2KOKF

Print version will be available soon!

Amazon.com: Super Speaker eBook : Nazari, Sheila, DKC, Adrian: Kindle Store

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AI causes public-speaking skills to be more valuable than ever.

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

There is a lot of fear and excitement around the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. There is also speculation around what jobs are going to be available in the future. With change happening so quickly, it’s difficult to predict what the nature of jobs will be in the next five years, much less in the next decade. Parents and teachers are just as confused as anyone about what the future will hold and what skills children should be learning to be successful.

However, AI cannot replace people when it comes to true human authentic expression and connection.

With these changes in technology, it is more important than ever for children to start learning communication skills, including public-speaking, as early as possible. Public-speaking is one of the most important skills that people can learn to express themselves effectively.

I have worked with countless individuals who have told me that they never learned public-speaking until high school or college. As an introvert, I struggled to speak up in class and didn’t know how to plan and deliver an effective speech. As I started interviewing for jobs, I scrambled to learn how to effectively communicate my knowledge and experience, but it wasn’t until I was breaking into the world  of corporate training, that I fully immersed myself in learning public-speaking. There were a lot of bad habits and fears that I had to overcome.

I wondered why this information hadn’t been taught earlier, especially since children are more likely to communicate authentically. Waiting to learn public-speaking just gives the fear a chance to grow.

If I had been a great public-speaker from the time I was young, I wouldn’t have turned into such an advocate for children learning public-speaking. Finding my voice and being able to express myself confidently has helped me in employment and in my personal life more than any other skill.

After years of experience, I came up with a simple five-step method for public-speaking, and I noticed that there were few resources aimed at children to learn public speaking, so I adapted the method to fit their needs.

Many times, public-speaking is taught to kids by adults in a format that was designed for adults.

Telling children that they should learn something because it’s important from an adult perspective isn’t the most effective teaching method. Over thousands of years, stories have proven to be an effective teaching method, especially for children.

In the book, Super Speaker, the protagonist is a sixth-grader who takes on the identify of her favorite superhero to navigate middle school and learn public-speaking. Since the story is told from the perspective of an eleven-year old, it demonstrates why it is important to learn this skill from the perspective of her age group versus from the perspective of an adult. The five-step method is incorporated into the storyline and adds to the plot of a sixth-grader who struggles with the normal aspects of starting middle school including friendships, fitting in, and adjusting to changes. Other themes include friendship, kindness, self-worth, and standing up for yourself and others.

Pre-order Super Speaker on Amazon now! https://rb.gy/eo5fm

Storytelling - overrated or overlooked teaching tool?

Image by David Mark from Pixabay

Storytelling has played a key role for humans for thousands of years. It doesn’t take money or resources to tell stories, yet it has helped build connections and relationships throughout history. Storytelling isn’t only a form of timeless entertainment but also an important and effective teaching tool that is often overlooked.

Many textbooks and lessons for children are written in a dry, formulaic manner. Children are curious and eager to learn. Although they are not born to think that school will be boring, the way that concepts and information are presented to them can cause them to lose interest and believe that the entire topic is boring.

Why is storytelling effective?

Stories don’t just engage the mind, but also aim to elicit emotions, and are helpful in teaching lessons.

In the book, How to Tell Stories to Children, authors Joseph Sarosy and Silke Rose West, illustrate why stories should be used as a vital part of teaching.

According to Rose West and Sarosy, one reason is that people are more likely to remember material from a story (2021). “Memory has as much to do with how information is taken in as how it is recalled. Attention plays a key role, telling the brain where and when to lay down tracks for the incoming information. As we all know, however, attention is a limited resource. Storytelling, along with its central characters, emotional gravity, unusual plot developments, and descriptive language, is one of the most powerful tools we have for gaining and retaining attention” (Rose West & Sarosy, 2021, p. 108).

Have you ever read the same line over and over again without paying attention and then not been able to recall what you just read a few minutes later?

We’ll remember information differently based on how we gain that information. The package that is used to deliver that information plays a key part in how much of it the learner engages with and retains.

Information presented in a dull way doesn’t have the same effect as information presented in an interesting way even though it’s the same information. Start with the end result or goal in mind – the student learns the information. Now, work backwards from there. How do I present this topic in a way that causes the audience to listen? Who is my audience? What is their knowledge level? What do they find interesting?

This method may seem time-consuming and it certainly takes more time than just regurgitating facts and statistics from a text book, but put it into the context of your goal. Your goal shouldn’t be to present the information. If that was your only goal, then obviously, reading the facts would be the fastest way to reach the goal.

Keep in mind that the goal is that the child learns the information. In that case, it is more efficient to use a story or an anecdote to present the information in an interesting way, because the extra time it takes upfront to come up with a creative package for the information will help shorten the time it takes for the learning to occur.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction  

“We did not choose books solely for their instructional value. I would even say we chose them mainly on the basis of the enthusiasm they were likely to arouse in the children – as opposed to in us, or in the school-district officials,” wrote Céline Alvarez, a bestselling researching and educator, in her book The Natural Laws of Children: Why Children Thrive When We Understand How Their Brains Are Wired (Alvarez, 2019, p. 186). She observed that the children were much more engaged when they were interested in the story.

Common Core standards required students to have nonfiction be a certain percentage of their reading instead of primarily reading fiction. Natalie Wexler, education journalist, points out in The Knowledge Gap that the argument in favor of this change toward nonfiction was that students would gain useful knowledge versus reading fiction, which didn’t teach anything. However, a challenge they ran into was that. without having relevant knowledge, the students struggled to examine or even understand the nonfiction texts. They were better able to understand fiction since it was based on familiar human behavior (Wexler, 2019).

Certainly, there are merits to reading fiction and nonfiction. Why not have both in the same text? An entertaining story that elicits enthusiasm and has educational value.

Using storytelling to teach public-speaking

I wrote Super Speaker because I wished that I had been exposed to public-speaking at a younger age, because developing my presentation skills helped me gain confidence and become a better communicator in many different arenas of life.

Sure, I could’ve just written my framework for effective public speaking – the  5 P’s of Presentations and the descriptions - and have been done with it. It would’ve taken me much less time and effort and it would take the reader much less time and effort as well. But there wouldn’t be any emotions involved. That method wouldn’t have portrayed public-speaking as interesting and would’ve been less likely to engage the reader at their level. The book’s main characters are sixth-graders starting middle school and going through changes that are relevant to the audience.

Instead of having the kids listen to an adult lecturing them about why they better learn public-speaking, they are treated to a story that elicits emotions and hopefully makes them want to continue reading. As they learn the steps, they are also exposed to the importance of public-speaking, but not as a skill that they’ll use someday somehow as an adult. Instead, they can see how they could use it in their current world along with practical steps that they can use.