Practice Matters: Motivating Students to Rehearse
As a Communications instructor I stress the importance of public speaking skills in many of my courses. To aid students in optimizing their speech presentations, I include class time for small group rehearsal. After a dozen semesters teaching communications I have observed that many students do not engage in the rehearsal activity or they use the dedicated time ineffectively. To optimize the process and motivate students to practice their speeches, I changed the lesson plan in two ways: 1) conduct more than one rehearsal activity for shorter periods of time and 2) break do