Before the students get to the podium, taking time to make sure the speech is well written can help to ensure a smooth delivery.

Being able to critique their written speech before it is delivered is an important skill to develop to help gifted students become more confident in their ability to communicate.

This is a reproducible lesson plan that GATE teachers, and teachers with students prepared for the challenges of public speaking can use as an introduction to learning how to evaluate their written work.

Assessing the Speech

You are going to decide what is important about your speech writing - what is good and what is not so good. Your group can discuss what “good” really means; what does each good element look like?

What does “excellent” look like? What does “basic” look like? You can then create a list of observable traits that indicate what the element means. The group will take these issues raised below, and develop a "1-4" analytic scoring rubric with 4 points being the highest rating for each criterion and 1 point being the lowest. The details of this process are defined further below.

For example, if your group is writing an informative speech, you may decide to look at the elements that would be important in your minds for assessing that kind of speech. You may decide that "analysis of the topic," "does the speech use proper reasoning," "is there enough proof to act as evidence that your speech works," "is there a clear opening, middle and end to the speech," "does the speech instruct the listener what to do with the information," and "will the speech attract and hold the targeted audience's interest for the duration of the speech." If these are your assessment criteria, you could summarize these points this way:

-Analysis: How well does the speech reflect an understanding of the topic?

-Reasoning: Is the speech believable, and does the audience have enough background to understand the new material?

-Evidence: Is there enough information given to prove your points?

-Organization: Does the speech flow from beginning to end?

-Interest: Will the speech be interesting to its audience?

The aim of assessing the written speech is to improve the speaker's confidence by diagnosing the elements of the speech and providing feedback regarding how well the speaker is writing his or her speech using specific criteria.

For each rubric you create, you should follow this formula. First, decide what the objective for the speech will be in terms of how you want the audience to react. Continuing the work you did earlier in this section, try to fill in the blanks for the objective:

Speech Objective: This speech will (encourage, motivate, inform, etc.) my audience to (learn more, buy something, do something, etc.).

Next, you decide upon your evidence, or what is your proof in the speech that it will meet the objectives. Again, fill in the blanks for your evidence:

Speech Evidence: The objective will be evident when the speech contains these elements (list the hoops through which the speech must jump here).

Finally, you have to build in an assessment piece. There are two parts to the assessment. First, what are the observable criteria that the speech must have to evidence that it is meeting its objective? Second, what is the rating scale (usually 1 through 4 works well) that you will use?

Once you decide on the scale, then you need some observable and easily understandable descriptions of what each point value means. What does a 4-point assessment really look like? What does a 1-point assessment look like?

Your next step within the group is to agree on these rating exemplars, or more simply, what would a good speech look like for each criterion? For your purposes, what does a very good, or 4-point analysis look like? Have these discussions within your class for each criterion so that you can create a document that everyone can use to find examples or descriptions of each criterion. For example, below are some illustrative descriptors for Criterion Number Five, Interest:

4 Points. The speech is:

Interesting & Worthwhile

Well-Defined; it is clear as to what the central idea is

Supported with large amounts of relevant and appealing details

3 Points. The speech is:

Still somewhat interesting

Defined; the point of the speech does not hit you in the face, but it still is somewhat easy to find out what the point is

Supported with fair amount amounts of general detail. Detail might become repetitious

2 Points. The speech is:

Boring or somewhat uncreative

Very little to no relevant detail

Extremely hard to decipher the point of the speech

1 Point. The speech is:

Not at all creative, hard to follow

No detail

Seems to have no point

Finally, you will need to take these definitions and put them into a rubric.