In fostering an environment for better public speakers, Meg McConnaughy, the faculty director of public speaking in the Communication Studies Department, has redesigned the CMN 225 public speaking course to boost students' confidence and future abilities in public speaking.
The National Center for Academic Transformation, in collaboration with the Arizona Board of Regents, recently decided that they would help fund and support the redesigning of educational programs in the state.
"The process in receiving the grant money to help redesign the program was rigorous, to say the least," McConnaughy said.
The new model being piloted currently operates with 85 students who meet once a week in a lecture section that McConnaughy teaches.
After the lecture, the group is broken down into four smaller lab sections, in which students meet weekly to prepare, practice and deliver speeches and receive audience feedback from trained teacher assistants (TAs), who are also called student directors.
Matthew Starr, a life science senior and student director for the program, said he thinks the program has been a wonderful learning experience for him and his students.
"Being one of the student directors has been great because the students look up to you as an authoritarian figure, and to see the students respond by excelling has been extraordinary to see," Starr said. "It is especially helpful when you meet people with teaching degrees and you are able to tell them that you are helping teach a college class without a degree."
Under the older model, students in public speaking classes were assigned to give 25 speeches throughout the semester. Also, classes were lecture intensive in the beginning and student speaking intensive at the end, which is something that McConnaughy said showed the "imbalance of the program."
"We had to find a way to balance public speaking courses," she said. "That meant the research, the speaking, mastering the skills, understanding the literature and putting it into practice. It is also difficult when you have such a cross section of majors that need to take communications courses."
McConnaughy said her goal was to help students have a uniform product for every class taught by experienced public speaking instructors who could provide high-quality instruction.
She employed students from the Communication and Language Lab (CALL) at ASU West to help assist students become better speakers.
CALL provided experienced mentors who went through training to assist in McConnaughy's courses.
McConnaughy said there are a variety of ways that students have found the program effective, including the fact that the students find it more comfortable to be working and speaking with TAs rather than with professors.
Steven Scruggs, a communications studies senior and student director, said he believes that "[TAs] all stand to benefit by gaining real-world experience in applied leadership" and that "watching students progress makes the experience that much better."
He added: "Being the pioneers of the pilot program has been extremely important, and I'm ecstatic that there will be more undergraduates and graduates assisting students' facilitators."
Reach the reporter at: joseph.hermiz@asu.edu.
