In the gifted education public speaking class, the listeners need to work as hard as the speaker so that everyone can grow.
While a classmate is speaking, the other students have three basic goals to attempt to achieve, all of which are important elements of the speaker's development:
-To assess the speech and the speaker by first creating standards for evaluation.
-To lower the speaker's anxiety by focusing and not providing distractions.
-To prescribe the steps to take for the speaker to improve confidence.
What Not to Do!
To help you get a better feel for some of the behaviors that can really damage a speaker's pride and eventual development, below are five absolute ways to discourage a speaker.
It is important to realize that even when the students in a gifted public speaking class seems to be paying attention, if their reflective comments are not honest, it is just as potentially damaging as talking during someone else’ speech time. To avoid these problems, whatever you do as classmate when offering a critique do not:
-Offer clichés as real advice.
-Drift off during the speech and then pretend to have all of the right comments.
-Try to show-off by listing trivial concerns or to nit-pick.
-Make comments directed at the speaker's personality.
-More over, maybe the worst of all - let someone "get away" with a flawed speech. This proves that you do not care about the speaker's growth enough to take the personal risk of being honest. It is very difficult to develop trust within a group if everyone sweet-talks to one another instead of employing genuine communications, especially if there are hidden agendas. A hidden agenda is a message or a purpose beneath the message being communicated to the speaker.
