Public speaking is an important skill for teachers, yet most of the time it is undervalued. Here we give you our tips to improve your classes.
Knowing your subject and being able to transmit your knowledge effectively are two very different skills, especially when you are an introverted person, yet teachers should overcome these difficulties and find themselves at ease when speaking with their class to engage their students.
If this doesn’t come yet natural to you, especially when you are teaching in classes with a large number of people, or you don’t speak the language of your students, there are a few tricks you can use to help you fake it, until you make it.
What is Public Speaking?
When we say public speaking skill, it generally means how you keep your point in front of your listeners and how good you are at explaining things and your point to others.
Why is Public Speaking Important for a Teacher?
Public speaking skill is a very important part of the teacher’s life. A teacher always has to address their students, give speeches on various activities, participate in school group discussions, communicate in family, etc.
A good teacher is a teacher who makes their topic interesting to their students, not making their students feel bored while attending their lecture. Making students understand the thing that you are teaching is not an easy task. It requires a good set of communication and public speaking skills to make your topic clear to everyone.
Public speaking becomes more important if you are teaching higher standards because higher standard topics usually are difficult to understand, and if you can’t explain things properly, it makes things worse for the student. But if the teacher doesn’t have good public speaking skills, then, no matter how good he/she is at a particular subject, they are not able to explain things to their students properly.
If you are a teacher reading this article, then your public speaking skills should be better because your students will follow the same thing that you have. For making the thing perfect, the first teacher should be perfect because if the teacher is not perfect in communication, how can he/she make her/his students perfect.
In many instances, a lot of teachers lost their teaching job because they couldn’t explain things properly to their students. Typically, new teachers who have just started teaching find public speaking difficult because they are not used to it. But as everyone knows, no one is born perfect. Perfection is the thing that comes when you work on your weak points.
So in this article, I will share some tips by following you to improve your public speaking skills.
Tips for Teachers to Improve Their Public Speaking Skills
1. Know What You Want To Say
For good communication, you first need to clarify what exactly you want to say. You should need a well-researched good idea about what you want to communicate in public or with the students. Unless you know know what exactly you want to say, how can you explain it to others ? So before you speak i, you should have a clearpicture of your topic, which you want to explain in public.
2. Don’t Be So Nervous
Many times while addressing a speech, many teachers become nervous, so their public speaking gets disturbed, and they can’t explain a topic properly. This type of situation mostly comes in front of the new teachers. These things happen mostly due to negative thoughts and lots of expectations from yourself.
Rather than carrying lots of expectations, be calm. Carrying lots of expectations will only make you feel more burden and stress. Do not live in the future; live in the present. So when you face such a scenario, take a pause and drink some water and remove the negativity from yourself and then start your public speaking again.
3. Relax
Many times a teacher who teaches a few students feels stressed when they have to address a large crowd, such as annual speeches. This same scenario also applies to the teacher who started their teaching career recently. This type of teacher feels anxiety when they face such situations. So before starting speaking in public, teachers should do some relaxing activities. One such relaxing activity is breathing in and breathing out. By doing such activity, teachers will feel less anxiety and feel relaxation which automatically helps to give good public interaction.
4. Make a Note of The Highlighted Point
When a teacher is teaching a large topic, it tends to happen that they forget to explain some points, which leads to arises some questions to listeners. To make these things clear, you should make set notes of bulletin points that you have to say. By making such a note of point, it will easily make your teaching good which directly makes your public speaking well.
5. Don’t Memorize
While teaching, do not memorize your speech or lesson word to word, which you have to give during interaction with listeners or with your student. If you try to memorize the thing, it tends to happen that you may forget something due to which your anxiety increases, and because of that, your communication rhythm turns to weird silence. Rather than this, you should make a highlight point which I have earlier mentioned above.
6. Use Simple Words
As a teacher, you may know various kinds of difficult and complicated words that may not be known by the public. And because knowing such words, you may use that word during your public speaking, but it is not the same for others to digest this type of sentence and words. So during public speaking, you should not use such complicated words.
7. Don’t be Fast During Speaking
During the communication, the teacher must avoid speaking fast. This scenario arises when there is less time, and you have explained a large part of things to the listeners. But you should not speak fast. You may think that you have explained the large topic to them in a short time, but on the other hand, they will not understand anything that you have explained. So in such a spot, you should only highlight the point rather than explaining it briefly.
8. Use Sense of Humor
When you are continuously speaking for an hour, it makes the student feel tired. So in such circ*mstances, you should use humor in public speaking; this will make them refresh and also make the topic interesting. By saying to use humor in public speaking, I don’t mean that you should always use humor after 2-3 sentences. If you do this, it will make your public speaking more or less than stand-up comedy. I simply mean that use some humor in 15-20 minutes
9. Take Feedback
The mistake can only be improved by you when you get to know about them. So when you are done with your public speaking, you should ask your student for Feedback about the session. By taking the Feedback, you will know about the thing which is not going properly, and you will know about your mistake. And as soon as you get to know about your weakness, you should make a note of them and improve them in your next public speaking.
10. Ask Questions
During your public speaking, you should ask some questions to your students in between the conversations. This will let you know how much of the thing that you have spoken is actually understood to them and what is the point that should explain again so that everyone gets a clear picture of what you are speaking. Besides, these will also help you know how attentive your student is in the topics that you are teaching.
11. Watch Your Video
As you’re taking feedback, you will get to know about some mistakes that you should avoid. But sometimes, your student can not point out some of your mistakes in Feedback. Maybe because they think you would scold them or they don’t feel that is a major problem and due to which meanwhile you think that there were no mistakes anymore. But they are the problem that you don’t know, and if you want to improve it, you should see your own recorded video and see the problem that is not mentioned in the Feedback and should be corrected. This will help you analyze yourself while speaking publicly.
12. Learn From Others
While you are finding out your mistakes in your public speaking, there are lots of things that should be added to your public speaking so that it becomes more attractive. So to make your communication better you should watch people who are already expert public speakers and learn from them. You will learn a lot of things from their presentation, and once you observe them wisely, you should learn to emphasize that point in your public speaking. After you go through all the points that are mentioned above will definitely help you to improve your public speaking.
Always remember, as you are a teacher, you are at such a place where you can influence others. Many people will copy your way of public speaking, especially your students. So be perfect in your public speaking so others who copy you can also be perfect.
