I remember the first day of my first, and only, public speaking class, a class I was taking only because it was a general ed. requirement. (I doubt I would have signed up for a public speaking class on my own initiative – too anxious for that at that stage in life.) I remember going through the school cafe on the way to the class, stopping to use the restroom, and feeling this wave of dread and anxiety. I steeled myself and told myself that I just have to do it. Rip it off like a band-aid. I knew it was healthy, but I hated it all the same.
It was awkward and awful, and it was good and necessary, and I improved a lot through the course. I came away thinking that college should require more than just one public speaking class. The skills are too important.
After becoming a tutor I discovered how powerful explaining things out loud was for increasing my own understanding. Before I would have felt too weird talking to myself out loud, but after tutoring it felt natural; speaking out loud is a kind of information processing, and explaining things out loud is, I think, an essential component of learning.
While I only had the one class that fell under the subject of 'Speech', technically I had a number of classes after that I would consider public speaking classes in a broad sense. These were management and business classes that required public presentations. Again, these assignments were agonizing, but I tackled them head-on and felt that they were healthy and necessary. I came away thinking that every class ever should have a public speaking component. The more you do it, the better you get, and the better you get, the more manageable the anxiety becomes.
For the first time ever I had oral exams for one of my philosophy classes in Spring 2025 and Fall 2024. They were intense, and I prepared hard for them. Despite my preparations, I still made errors; I could have prepared better. (I did well overall and received As for both oral exams I took.) Again, healthy and challenging.
Oral exams teach the value and necessity of preparation and they force you to explain things in your own words on the spot. There's no relying on search engines or AI; you either know it or you don't in the moment. It's like an interview. You can easily bullsh*t written assignments (generally – depends on how they are designed), but there's really no way to bullsh*t an oral exam.
With AI tools like ChatGPT calling into question the legitimacy of student written work, and thereby calling into question the student's understanding of class material, oral exams are quickly becoming an essential tool to assessing a student's understanding. (I have no idea whether High Schools or Universities have started moving in this direction or not. It's not like you can use AI during a proctored test, so I imagine written tests aren't going away. It's written assignments that are losing relevance, though even in that case, you can generally tell whether something is legit or AI, as AI work, especially in philosophy, is poor in quality, milquetoast, uninspired, shallow, and often just straight up incorrect or misleading – for now.)
But given the massive pedagogical value of explaining ideas out loud, and the sheer importance of public speaking skills, oral exams are already highly valuable and underused. (I certainly wish I had more of them. They force a higher standard of preparation and understanding.)
Putting this all together, my thought is this: Schools K-12, and college, should focus on building the speaking skills of students. Students despise public speaking. That's understandable; they have no confidence in their speaking skills, and humiliation is just about the most painful thing there is. An example of a speaking assignment would be to record yourself on video explaining an idea, such as how to solve systems of equations. This process reveals gaps in understanding when you go silent and realize there's something you don't understand, can't explain, or have a question about. Students could be encouraged to leave in those silences in the recording and to write down then and there what their hangup is. These recordings are then sent to the teacher who watches them and makes notes on what students are either explaining incorrectly or what they struggle to explain. By sending the recordings to the teacher, the student doesn't have to worry about presenting in front of a group of people. But recording yourself is still a performance, one that can be critiqued by your teacher. It's much easier when the risk of embarrassment is limited to one person rather than a group. The teacher gives 1) Feedback on speaking skills and 2) as mentioned, prepares teaching notes based on recordings.
This has the additional advantage of making lessons highly relevant to each student. Often students feel disconnected from lessons, making it harder to care, harder to pay attention to, and harder to be motivated to show up at all. But when the lessons cover the mistakes students made in their explanation videos, and answer questions students have, each student suddenly has a clear personal stake: if I don't show up to class, I may never fill those gaps of understanding that I am aware of. That's a painful thought.
Students could then be required to make a follow-up video re-explaining the same topic to show their improvement from before and after. By the time the student is required to speak in front of the class, they are well-prepared, having gone several rounds on speaking, explaining, clarifying, and re-explaining a topic (students could be required to pick a unique presentation topic for their class presentation, one they must prepare for on their own using what they've learned from the class-based speaking assignments).
Students would be far more confident going into these class presentations because 1) They have prepared well for them and 2) Because of teacher feedback, they have an idea of where they fall in terms of speaking skills. They know what to expect in terms of how others will react to their speaking.
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