 In this session, we will reflect on the intentions, goals, and practices of speaking pedagogies. We will establish ways to build an inclusive and supportive classroom context for speaking and listening, and we will learn strategies from one another for addressing the common challenges of teaching and learning oral skills in the remote classroom in particular. And I'll post that just in case I don't know if everybody can just leave to the padlet again if you want to, if you haven't already added to the padlet, you can do so. And right now, continue to do so as we're speaking. So welcome. And as we're starting to get started, I'm going to actually share my screen so that we can all see the padlet and the wonderful work you've all been doing. So here is what we have so far. So a lot of, there is a very diverse amount of ideas here in terms of how to incorporate speaking into the language classroom. Some of them are geared towards language courses and building community and trust and doing small group work, small teamwork in the language classroom. But it seems like there's an overall push to incorporate student voices through speaking and listening skills. And some of the ways in which you seem to be doing that is through discussion boards, small group work, just the overall sharing of ideas, and then using even more formalized ways of speaking such as debates. So thank you for sharing how you're using speaking and listening skills in the classroom. And now we're going to start moving into the approaches that one might take to incorporate speaking and listening into their classrooms, whether it be language or literature or other disciplines. We're interested in seeing all the different ways that you think about speaking in the classroom, that you incorporate speaking in the classroom. Because one of the things that's so central to our approach and the approach of this session is thinking about the ways that speaking happens in such a range of contexts, in different disciplines, and in a range of like from traditional like the oral presentation at the front of the room to as we just saw in the Padley like small group discussions. And so some of what Layla and Brie and I have been discussing is how we can address and harness this diversity in speaking situations and thinking about the remote classroom as itself part of that situation. So not just sort of a compromise where we have to move ourselves online, but thinking about how it sort of builds and contributes to the way that we are going to teach students their speaking skills. So one thing that I have observed in my research on oral pedagogies is that they're often taught with a one size fits all approach. Few of us, I think, devote like explicit time in the classroom to talking about to addressing, you know, how to speak in front of a class. And our students tend to seek out resources that we have that are sort of once one size fits all sort of some tips or rules like top 10 things to do. So, you know, we see here just some screen grabs from various videos that they go to on the Internet that sort of address all disciplines, all genres, all situations, and there are things like, you know, dress appropriately and come prepared and beyond time and you know, imagine your audience naked and these sorts of things that we've all been learning over the years. And as someone who has been teaching writing at UBC for many years now, I'm struck by how insufficient these resources are compared to the resources and the deep theoretical well that we mobilize when we teach writing. And many, you know, when we teach writing, many of us have moved away from tips or rules approach. And instead, we teach students to communicate based on the situation that they're in, the disciplinary situation, the generic situation. So I want to share two questions that are driving my research into how we can approach or speaking pedagogies and that will drive the approach that we're taking today to the session. So how can we align speaking pedagogies with established writing pedagogies attending specifically to the diverse situations, disciplinary and professional in which students are called upon to speak? And how does the remote classroom itself inform, sorry, there it is, inform these situations and how we can harness, how can we harness the opportunities it provides for developing speaking skills. And I think actually that the online classroom, because it offers us so much flexibility, it really is, there's a lot of opportunity there. And like I said, we also want to think about the online classroom as itself a specific situation that invites its own protocols and ways of speaking and ways of addressing. So we will approach these questions today with two sort of basic principles or two big points in mind. And the first is that I would like to think about speaking as an opportunity, not for students to perform for us, but for students to communicate with us and with each other. And there's something maybe somewhat obvious there, but also there's actually quite a bit of research in psychology where that shows that public speaking anxiety is reduced when speakers can be convinced to reframe their understanding of speaking as a form of communication instead of as a performance. And this is from research on what is called the performance communication continuum. So, where at one end, we have what's been called a performance orientation, which defines the primary objective of a speech as making a positive aesthetic impression on the audience, especially via flawless delivery. At the other end is a communication orientation, which views the primary objective as sharing information with the audience. And the communication orientation views the audience, not as a group of evaluators but rather as receivers who respond to a speaker's message. And I think, you know, we can I recognize this when I think about like asking my students to talk about some group work they've done or giving a more formal presentation and they're just talking to me right there. They're not talking to the whole room, they're just like waiting for me to think they've done a good job, you know, in this moment. And I think that this is perpetuated by those tips, right, like what's important, how you dress, you know, your punctuality is important, but, you know, we're teaching students to understand these moments as performance instead of as communication. And what I saw briefly on the on the padlet was was I think the actually a real shared a real shared interest in in thinking about these more informal modes of communication and and and thinking about the mass forms of communication and not a performance so that's great. The second principle that I want to lay down here is that we want to really focus on the the whole classroom experience, and not just the speaker and you know how do we get our students to be more confident speakers to be better speakers. And we need to also focus on focus on the people being communicated with. I did a focus group a few years ago with students about their experience speaking in class, and they told me that their experience would be improved if their peers were actually listening to them. So they said some people are really disrespectful they don't even pretend to listen. And, and they, you know, the way that they were inviting us to think about how teaching speaking as a form of communication, really is also about teaching the listener how to listen, and students talked about how their peers should learn the protocol, like when you go to the theater, you know you can't be noisy you can't be eating. Those of us who take a rhetorical genre studies approach to teaching writing have long taken this this approach right this modeling approach inviting students into the customs and the conventions of the disciplines that we teach for their writing communication and so how do we translate this into speaking. And a lot of this is about classroom climate and about making a space in which students understand the expectations for equitable and productive speaking and listening so I'm going to turn it over to Layla now to say a bit more about classroom climate and then we'll move on to discussing the inevitable challenges that even with these wonderful foundations, we will find ourselves in and how we can sort of think through them with these principles. Thank you move early. I think, as you point out it's important for us to remember that we create the conditions for speaking and listening pedagogies to be accessible and inclusive and available to our students and students arrive to our classrooms from a diversity of backgrounds with a diversity of expectations and experiences that will play a role in how they take up speaking and listening in our classrooms. It's vital that we are intentional and self reflective in the design, including reflecting on what our own expectations are of the students and maybe as move early points out our own kind of programming in terms of how we teach speaking pedagogies and the expectations we have currently, and speaking and listening and in our classrooms, and also considering the range of possibilities in how speaking and listening can be mobilized and we've seen that already on the padlet, while, you know, meeting the learning objectives and sort of our institutional strategic plan the goals for teaching students how to speak and publicly about research and their work. And really vital and key to that then is establishing that accessible environment fostering community, having clear structures, developing trust, and really valuing diversity in the design but also in how we present the, you know, our classrooms as a community who's contributing to our classrooms and the learning in our classrooms. One of the principles we might apply and possible approaches would be to adopt universal design for learning strategies and principles, as well as other approaches such as self regulated learning that foster student, student confidence and students own awareness of the benefits in speaking and listening not only to their own process but also to the processes of their fellow students and so things like making clear the objective and the purpose of everything that they're doing in relation to speaking and listening like what is the purpose what is the value, providing them with multiple means of engagement and expression and developing these these approaches, ensuring flexibility, maybe not having such tight timelines, creating different kinds of spaces for this, these activities to occur, offering choices within the learning objectives, and also educating ourselves and offering accessibility guidelines and support so making sure that we are also educating ourselves about speaking and listening, and you can also, you know, UBC has developed some EDI and teaching modules that can be helpful in sort of setting up these approaches, including universal design for learning. So, yeah, so anyway, so those are some considerations to take up as we're moving forward with our presentation today. So thank you to everyone who participated in the palette there are a wealth of resources and ideas there that we will be converting into a PDF and sharing with you after the workshop. But just to kind of recap a little bit because some some of us were coming in at different times. It seems that we are all in some way using speaking and listening pedagogies in the, the face to face or the online classroom I think now all of us are online. So many of our ideas may be coming from this. Hopefully it's not traumatic experience of teaching online, at least not this term, but some of the uses that that you have mentioned our student presentations. There's also group reviews getting students together to share ideas peer review group discussion. And from what I could gather from the tablet, you're privileging different skills and different processes in in your approach of these to these evaluations. So some of you are privileging the idea of breaking down concepts so when students are are in charge of breaking down the concepts for classmates, they take some time to learn it and go through it and then tend to be very laudatory of their classmates so it builds confidence when they share ideas, there's clapping at the end hopefully so they, they go out of the room with a little bit of confidence but also some of the skills that we're teaching here or some of the communicative processes are creating spaces for dialogue that aren't just driven by the instructor but promoted among students. Building community, this is particularly important in the online classroom. I noticed that some of the examples are coming from a language classroom and I can attest to that that building community and confidence in a language classroom is extremely important and also a literature or other disciplinary approach one right creating spaces for sharing expertise and even developing specific skills like fluency, accuracy, intercultural competence, these are all things that you're you're already doing in your classrooms. Moberly, Layla and I were discussing that while our adventurousness has been great in the online classroom. It has also come with quite a few challenges and so we want to take this time to ask you to return to the Padlet and and express maybe under your own contribution or others. Some of the challenges that you may have faced while trying to create these communities and use these inclusive approaches to speaking and listening pedagogies in the online classroom or in the classroom in general. So we're going to give you a few minutes to think about some of the challenges and share them again in the Padlet. And then after a few minutes I will put the Padlet back up so we'll be able to comment on some of these challenges together. Moberly, Layla and I share with you some of our uses and challenges of speaking and listening pedagogies in the in the online classroom. So I can already see some challenges that are that we're all facing students refusing to turn their camera on and even their microphone and breakout rooms so this could be challenging for even student presenters who are trying to facilitate discussion. The attitude that students don't care they're unresponsive to their peers. There's a lot of anxiety around oral presentations and speaking and listening activities in general, and and having having the same students always offer feedback in the classroom. So these are great we we are going to move on to some more specific uses and challenges and I think we will be able to address some of your concerns your challenges. In our examples particularly the ones related to getting students involved in breaking things down and also how to approach speaking and listening in larger class contexts. So we each are going to take a few minutes to share how we have you know the challenges we've had and how we have addressed them and then we'll open it up to we can go back to the Padlet and we can have a conversation all together so here's the first one. Okay, thank you Moverly. So one of my now sort of use this strategy a couple of times in my online classrooms I've also had students record videos together and upload them summarizing, you know a piece of writing but this is a approach I've taken the last two terms in developing students speaking and listening so the objective was for students to engage in spoken genres of knowledge sharing peer review and co construction of knowledge that are common in the scholarly situation. The challenge I've been working advantage college this term has been time zone issues, when can we all gather together so I pretty much have to teach mostly asynchronously. Also language confidence so the students are they willing to speak to one another in using English and also they're nervous about speaking in front of me and using English and also that common issue of a passive audience. What I've done then my solution has been to really heavily scaffold the assignments to make it low stakes so that oral part of the process are is not necessarily graded so it's very low stakes. And in that sense, but also it develops the students awareness of the benefits of the process, which is I've been found which has been the most really rewarding part of this process that I've taken them through. So part one is asynchronous. That's using written peer peer review using compare. So we have a lesson on effective feedback, what effect feedback is for, you know, situating it within the process of scholarly research and writing it each academic research and writing. And then we engage and compare peer review with lots of structure in terms of what's expected and the kinds of language they might use. And then also for each of these parts they would complete a reflection so they reflect on the process. You know, what their classmates contributed to their own process, how they supported their classmates and what they might do differently if they could do it again. And then I grade their feedback. I grade the feedback they provide to one another and give them some comments on that as well. Part two then is synchronous. This is the students have been in small groups throughout the term so they're in teams already. I put them into their small groups and they provide a spoken explanation of a pro of their projects outline so they produce an outline that I've provided to them. They share the screen with their small group. They have a, you know, they're all in they talk, they talk the other students through it, and then there's a question and discussion period and everybody is expected to ask questions. And when I did this last term, you know, this at the beginning of the term, nobody was speaking to one another in their breakout rooms and then their small groups. By the end of this process, they were in this session, speaking to one another, asking good questions, talking about their projects and doing exactly what I wanted them to do which is to develop that awareness of the benefits of this process and how it can work effectively. And then I created their outline. And then I popped into their, their, you know, just to sort of see how it was going throughout the session. And parts three then was more a little higher stakes they had a mini presentations in small groups different people this time, you know, with shared interest with discussion and question period. And again, they completed a reflection on the process and I created the script. The outcomes were that the listening and providing an incorporating of effective feedback was so good by the end of the term. They really had a sense of empowerment over their own ideas and contribution, there was an appreciation and of the ideas and contributions of others, and confidence in speaking so that this term, I'm teaching the same students they're coming into the classroom with a lot of much higher level of confidence in terms of what they can contribute to one another and what their classmates can contribute to their work in terms of the spoken genres and speaking and listening to one another, particularly about their projects and their process as they're developing their projects. And I think now Brie will talk to us about large lecture situations. Thank you. So, the, yeah, this is, this is a situation where I teach a literature and translation course that used to be 30 or 40 students and now it, it sort of hovers around 70 or 80 per term. It's an issue in the face to face classroom because I always requested to teach in orchard commons, which accommodates tables of students so that they can get to know each other very well, but I was faced with some issues in terms of of class design and I used to do discussion later sessions where pairs of students would would get together to not present on a topic but develop and design an original activity that would help show and showcase to other students how they were understanding the text and make an interactive activity that would get everybody involved in the learning process. With 80 students, it's not possible to have pair based presentations or discussion leader sessions anymore because there simply aren't enough class sessions and it's quite intimidating for students in pairs to speak to a group of 80. So, I still wanted to have a level of student engagement and I had taught in arts one which has a format where you lecture on Mondays and then have seminars on Wednesdays and Fridays and then smaller group tutorials. So I wanted to privilege a situation in which I was able to deliver some of the theoretical and very tough content to digest content on Mondays and then allow for a lot of student voices on Wednesdays and Fridays. So to accommodate for this very large class size, I turned the discussion leader session into a group facilitation exercise. So it again is a three part process where if I typically have 10 groups of around eight students. And each week one to two students per group facilitates an exercise based on an assigned topic so for talking about a specific text that week. They will choose an original approach and design questions select passages from the text. Use other resources to spark conversation and they do this in the form of a written facilitation guide so just as Leila explained. I also mark the facilitation guide they turn it into me a few days in advance I give them feedback on where they might be met with resistance where it might be where they might find laws in the conversation just based on my knowledge of their class members and their own, their own expertise and who they're working with because one of the benefits of this type of exercise is that they really get to know very well these eight people that they're sharing a group with every single Friday. So they turn in the written facilitation guide I give them a little bit of feedback and then every Friday, these facilitators lead a big part of the class discussion it's roughly 20 minutes of our in class experience. So I turn up the class with a warm up that is related to some of the facilitation questions that are coming up in some of the groups, and I create a master facilitation guide that incorporates the eight different approaches to the same exact topic. So I share that with the groups in advance. And then the students facilitate the in class exercise and then together these eight students monitor a follow up canvas discussion that takes place each week. So students have from Friday through Wednesday to comment on on what they did in their small groups so that even though we are in the same small group they have an opportunity to see what has been said on the same topic outside of their group. And the facilitators are responsible for posting a wrap up to open up the discussion on what was discussed in their small class discussions. So this is, this is one of the best ways that that I've come across to really get the students involved, they need to demonstrate both analytical and planning skills. And we also need to demonstrate interpersonal and communication skills because they know what will work for their groups in fact when they're putting their guides together they'll say oh I know, I know that so and so and so and so for my group may not respond to this but I want to challenge them this week to really think outside of the box so I really want to incorporate this type of question. And it also encourages them to listen because the final phase or for the final phase they need to post a wrap up that summarizes very succinctly, what was said and what was done in the group. So they listen and take notes, as their peers are sharing their ideas to the questions that they produced. And then part of their wrap up is actually talking about some of the challenges that they may have faced what questions fell flat. And so they do this in a sort of reflection that closes out their written facilitation guide. So this is an example of how to engage. How to engage learners and speaking and listening activities in a in a large literature context. And I think it could be applicable to different disciplines as well. And to you Moverly. Okay, this is me so I think there you know there's there's themes across the three are three solutions that were that we're offering and I think they do. And also to some of the just the values that I saw on on the on the palette that I think a lot of us share in this room about about encouraging voices to especially in low stakes and also in in more in smaller groups right So this is what I call the mini conference project and I do this, I have done it for many years in classes of 25 or 30 as part of the final research project that my students are doing. But I think that the remote classroom would make it possible actually should do this in a much larger class size and I know that classes is a real obstacle for many people to do any kind of any kind of speaking because it's just not always time for for so many students to speak So the objective of this assignment is to have students practice sharing their ideas in an academic setting as part of this research process and that speaking is, you know, like I was saying earlier sort of not a final performance, but but part of how their research is developing. And of course the challenge is that that I'm taking on here is that any time we ask students to speak in the classroom it may send panic through many of them. And as as Laila was saying, you know, also when you ask them to listen and respond that can also be, you know, be met with very awkward silence where you're, you know, we have a tough cell trying to get them to respond back to each other. When you just say like, you know, do you have any questions. So this is an in progress solution. And it begins with offering precedence to help students learn those protocols that I was talking about earlier, and then it proceeds to scaffold various steps that facilitate similar to what we what Laila and Brie were talking about multiple modes of communication with higher and lower stakes along the way so it goes something like this. The first part is the precedence part and I'm really invested in showing students precedence of what it looks like to speak in a in a in a research setting in an academic setting, and what it looks like to listen and I encourage students to attend talks I have brought guests to give talks I have shown videos of talks in class and there's one video that I showed that I just sort of landed upon sort of fortuitously. And it's a video that shows like a full sort of a montage of what happens at a conference. I attended a conference that I attended as literature conference, and it shows the speakers it shows the listeners it shows like the coffee table and people sort of chatting. And so I have my students sort of play pseudo anthropologist and sorry if this is reductive to any anthropologist in the room but I have them sort of just you know it look at it and say, Okay, are they are these speakers speaking from notes are they memorizing their speech. What are the listeners doing are they drinking coffee because they're so bored because of you know what somebody is saying so just kind of getting that sense of what this looks like and as a as an aside, I am just this week basically embarking on a TLEF funded project to build more resources like this for us for faculty and students so that we can help our students access these precedents. And in particular the project is about precedents of students so having students be able to see other students speak. So if anybody's interested in that I'd be happy to talk about that after the session. So part part to then after we've we've looked at what this looks like is to prepare their project. They work together in I put them into panels. So their groups of three or four students. And their first task is to write a panel introduction together. And this would this ask them to informally just kind of present to each other what their topics are what their research projects are so that they can then write this little 30 second introduction. And then the presentation includes this, this, this short introduction that they elect somebody to read. And then each of them gives a two minute presentation presents sort of a summary of what their research is and then there is the question period. And I've been doing this in live classrooms for many years. And I think the remote version which I'm trying this year actually offers us a lot of a lot of flexibility that that really also speaks to the heart of the project about conversation and maybe sort of sidesteps or addresses the question of the cameras I know that came up a lot on the pad that like they don't turn on their cameras. So maybe these are some ways to think sort of around that because just begging them obviously doesn't work I think we've all tried that. So, so one option is that the panels can be presented live and if you have a synchronous class, the classes is taking notes maybe with their cameras off and then they're sent to canvas to have an asynchronous discussion. And this sort of allows the conversation to have its own parts to be recorded and to to go back and forth. There's another option where you can pre record the panels students pre record this everybody watches them on their own time and then what's happening in the live class is actually the Q&A, and that's, and that is that something that everyone comes prepared to do, and that is again this way of not the performance of the speaker, but the what that's moment of speaking produces which are these ideas that then people discuss and of course a lot of the literature about speaking talks about how pre recording is an option for a lot of is a preferred option for lots of students. And then finally I think the third version is everything happening asynchronously so students pre record, they watch them on their own time and then attached to each sort of video is a canvas discussion where you can see the conversation happening. And then finally the fourth part of this which I think is really really important part is the revision. So, the students have to take a question that they got and try and incorporate that in their final paper before they handed in. So, you know, someone said, could you talk more about this they have to then expand on that in the paper and I think just pushing the presentation component, not at the end again as the sort of end piece but just kind of somewhere along the middle. And also emphasizes that the point is to communicate your ideas so that you can get feedback on those ideas. And, and hopefully the outcome then is that students see this context for academic speaking, and, and that they see that presentations are our work in progress which they are for many of us right they are ways that we share ideas and build our ideas. And they're just one of the many ways that we that we do our research and that we communicate with one another in the university. We do have to wrap up, and I knew it would be hard and it is. But thank you for all the I see there's been lots of questions and answers in the chat and I would just invite you to keep the conversation with us going as well. I think we have we are considering offering a second sort of follow up workshop to this, which, when we could maybe kind of do more of a war about deep dive into some of the kind of exercises and things that you're working on so please do. Lisa just put the link to the survey in the chat so please do fill out the survey there's a question on there about like, how else can we help you what other resources and workshops would you appreciate. Thank you so much for the email addresses if you want to get in touch with any of us directly, and a few of the tips I would say as a disclaimer that first one it does include some of those top 10 videos that I was mocking but it's sort of a wiki that includes a whole bunch of things and so beyond that there's also some other first more than some of those top 10 tips. So thank you so much everybody, and we will follow up you will get your the padlet will will will send you some of the links and the documents that came up today so that I can keep going.