Getting A Choice

Students in my classes are currently in the process of giving their second graded speech of the semester. In past years I have followed the informative speech with the demonstration speech. My thinking has been that a demonstration speech really is a type of informative speech, so it should be the easiest one to do next.

I have had some students tell me they would rather do the persuasive one next, so this semester I decided to switch it up. My plan was to have the Persuasive speech go next in all of my classes, however I did not make this change on the syllabi for the classes that meet once a week, only on my Tuesday-Thursday class.

I was just going to leave it this way and see how it went but coming back from break a couple of students told me they had gotten confused and thought the demonstration speech was next. At the time I simply told them this was incorrect, it was the persuasive one. Then I got to thinking and the following class session I announced that they could pick which speech was next, so some of them could do a persuasive speech this round while others did a demonstration speech. I did specify that whichever one was not given this time around needed to be given for the third speech.

I am not sure if this was a good move or if it will make things to confusing on me and the class. Still, at this point, I have covered the information they need to know for both persuasive and demonstration speeches, so I am open for the experiment. If it works out then I may give students the choice in future classes. If it doesn’t then the experiment will start and end with the one class this semester.