Public Speaking
The ability to communicate clearly and concisely to a group is a skill required by most professions, yet it is still the number one fear for many adults. At Tesseract, we teach students to be confident, poised public speakers starting at an early age, by providing them with opportunities to learn and practice public speaking in a safe and encouraging environment.
Starting in lower school, as early as kindergarten, students gather as a group for Responsive Classroom Morning Meeting. Each student has the opportunity to speak to the class, greeting each other by name and sharing information that is important to them. As students progress throughout lower school, they present reports and projects to their class, as well as to parents, faculty and peers at the all-lower school Morning Meeting. Students also have the opportunity to sing and perform on stage—starting in early childhood—with grade-level concerts and plays, such as the second-grade Tall Tales performance.
In middle school, students continue to hone their public-speaking skills by presenting projects, reading short-stories and poetry, performing in concerts and short films, and singing, dancing and acting in Tesseract's annual spring musical. All middle school students also regularly participate in debates and oral presentations, such as the fifth-grade debates, which focus on current news topics, and the eighth-grade Individual Research Project (IRP), which includes a five to 10 minute presentation of each student's thesis, providing students with opportunities to research, present and support their views in front of groups of varying sizes and audiences.
Throughout high school, students continue to have opportunities to fine-tune their public speaking skills through various areas of study. Projects from the freshman class trip to the Mediterranean are presented to the Tesseract community, as are the Socrates Trial and students' Portfolio Presentations, in which students share a self-assessment of their personal and academic successes and challenges for the semester and field a question and answer session with an audience comprised of peers, faculty and members from the greater community.
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