Teacher Notes
This unit is designed to be flexible. It can run as a five-week skills course, or individual pages can be inserted into a text unit when students need to present, discuss, design or publish.
Core and extension routes
| Route | Speaking | Creating | Product |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core | One-minute talk, discussion protocol, three-slide plan. | Descriptive paragraph, film notes, group plan. | A short group presentation or zine. |
| Extension | Storytelling performance, chaired discussion, presentation with data. | Film sequence, picture-book spread, researched multimodal piece. | A published multimodal piece with rationale. |
| Support | Partner talk, sentence frames, scripted opening. | Guided description, storyboard template, source table. | A supported one-minute piece or poster. |
Low-stakes speaking routines
- Thirty-second share: one prompt, one partner, no audience.
- Concentric circles: students rotate partners and repeat a short explanation.
- Thinking aloud: narrate a decision rather than perform a polished answer.
- Record and review: students record on their own device and watch once, privately.
- Choral reading: the whole class speaks together to build volume and rhythm.
Speaking anxiety
Some students find speaking in front of others genuinely frightening. Offer a graduated audience: self, partner, small group, whole class. Allow a seated presentation, a recorded piece or a co-presented talk. Do not force a student to perform alone in front of the class. The goal is communication, not exposure.
Equipment and access
- Test audio and video before recording.
- Have a paper backup for any digital plan.
- Offer a low-tech alternative: poster, live talk, hand-made zine.
- Check that students can save and export their work.
- Provide captions or transcripts for any published audio or video.
Group management
- Assign roles, but rotate them across the unit.
- Ask groups to record decisions in a shared document.
- Use short check-ins rather than long progress meetings.
- Intervene early when contribution is uneven.
- Make the individual contribution note part of the process, not an afterthought.
Sensitive content
Personal storytelling can touch on grief, family conflict or other sensitive experience. Offer fictional or observational prompts alongside personal ones. Do not require disclosure. Set clear boundaries about what can be shared and remind students that they can change direction at any point.
Formative use
The checklists and tables are formative. Use them to notice patterns: Are students speaking to an audience or reading from a page? Are slides supporting or repeating the speech? Are sources credited? Are group roles working? Reteach the pattern for the whole class rather than correcting every individual error.
Printing and access
Every page prints cleanly. Storyboard and planning pages work well as A4 handouts. If students use screen readers, check that tables are read in order and that any visual model is described in text.