Tips on Improving Public Speaking & Competitive Debate Skills at Home (Part IV)
Build A Habit Practicing at Home
We hope you enjoyed Part I, II, & III of this blog series! If you haven't got a chance to read it yet you can do so here:
Tips on Improving Public Speaking & Competitive Debate Skills at Home (Part I).
Tips on Improving Public Speaking & Competitive Debate Skills at Home (Part II).
Tips on Improving Public Speaking & Competitive Debate Skills at Home (Part III).
In this series of articles, you will be able to learn about:
- Steps on how to help students build a habit of practicing at home
- Topics that can help students practice
- How to understand and track a student's progression
It is important to keep track of students' learning to see their improvements. It can be done in different ways: you can either use an excel sheet, paper, or a whiteboard. When you are keeping track, pay attention to the following things:
Context
It is easy to mark if a student has achieved something while not hitting some other goals. But the context matters, why didn't they achieve those goals? Were they too sleepy at 2 am to practice? Were the topics too hard? Were they too tired because of things that happened before the practice? Simply saying "yes" or "no" under skills cannot help you understand the students and their skills better. Work together with them to find out the reasons and adjust your topics, practice time etc..
Set a starting point
You don't know where you are if you don't know where you've been. Setting a start point for the first practice helps you set a baseline for the student's performance and visualize where they are going and how fast they are going.
Achieving Goals
Since you have already set goals when planning practice, you probably would think that a student would be able to reach the goal anyway with constant practice. But achieving goals is not that easy. If a student can reach a goal once or twice, it does not mean that they can stop improving on this area and should focus on other areas. Performing consistently is the REAL goal. If a student has successfully done something once or twice, try to change topics, or increase the audience group, change circumstances to see if the student can still hit the goal. If so, then it's time to congratulate them!
On LearningLeaders platform, we have a visualized version of students' progress for courses they take.
