Think about when, where, how, and how often you use the concept or concepts in your personal or professional life. Develop your speech using real or hypothetical examples based on your own personal experiences or perceptions. This activity appears to have a positive impact on students during all stages of the assignment. While preparing for their application speeches, students often comment about personal or professional contexts where public speaking concepts apply and how they did not realize the relevance of learning these concepts before preparing for this assignment. When presenting the speeches, students share cogent examples that describe for their classmates the utility or value of a variety of basic public speaking course concepts in numerous personal and professional contexts.
Reactions continue after the speeches are presented.
One striking example involves a student who apologized to his audience for his comment he had made about the course. After all, we talk all the time and we aren't going to be professional public speakers. It makes an impression on my family, my friends, my boss, my classmates, and my professors. The exercise developed by Mandeville involves the manufacture of a simple product using paper as the base material with the employment of basic office tools, but the focus is really the discovery of how to improve group communication skills. The students had to agree on a topic which they would be happy to discuss over a 2-hour period, and individual preparation for the group discussion had to be rigorous and structured so that the discussion could be free flowing and allow for a valid assessment.