In the Dragon’s Den · Wed Apr 12, 21:34 by Eleri Straker
One of the things I used to hate at school was having to speak in class. Fortunately, as I did the old O level system, oral work was something we didn’t have to do very often. That was something the ‘less able’ students did, the ones who did CSEs. As a school child, I didn’t think about this at all, but now, as an English teacher myself, it occurs to me that not doing any oral work in English actually put us more academic types at something of a disadvantage. We had to speak in lessons like French of course, and I remember the cold panic and the sweaty palms till this day.
Today it’s very different, and all students doing English for GCSE are obliged to take part in oral work, or ‘speaking and listening’ as it’s called today. And they hate it.
Out of a class of twenty-eight to thirty, I’ll be lucky to find half a dozen that actually enjoy the experience of standing up in font of their class mates, all teenage angst and spots, in order to make a complete idiot of themselves. Because this is how they feel. All of a sudden, the bravado and cheek disappear in a quivering, sweating mass of helpless fear. Even the class thugs diminish under the unforgiving gaze of twenty-seven teenagers. Terrifying. And I sympathise completely. When I’m feeling kind.
So recently, after a discussion with colleagues over coffee (when we share an awful lot of ideas – it’s that kind of department, no one is selfish with knowledge or thoughts) I decided to conduct a speaking and listening exercise in the style of the TV programme Dragon’s Den. It involved each student making a ‘pitch’ to four other students (carefully chosen by me) in front of the rest of the class. They had to try to sell an idea or a new invention to the four students – the Dragons. The individuals had about two minutes to persuade the Dragons to invest in their ideas.
It was a fascinating exercise, as students I believed would crumble in such a situation, rose to the challenge and blossomed, coming up with some intriguing ideas. But what was a real eye opener was one of the Dragons. This is a boy who is very ‘mouthy’ and actually very articulate when speaking as an individual. I can always count on him to perform brilliantly – as an individual. What surprised me was his generosity. When called on to be a Dragon I assumed that he’d be simply concerned about his own marks, but I was wrong. Faced with classmates who ‘dried’, he was fantastic. He fired questions at them, forcing them to speak and to argue with him. Students who would normally wallow in the low E or F grades suddenly started to perform at a much higher level, determined to stand up to this aggressor. At one point, realising that perhaps he was dominating the situation and wondering if he should back off, he glanced over at me. I gave him a surreptitious thumbs-up, so he continued. Single-handedly, he raised the marks of his classmates. It wasn’t all altruism though, he raised his own grade too. He got an A*. A real dragon in the making.
