Ambition in speaking & writing: TEDx by 8 year olds
“Do animals have a secret language?” We were up and running, and in front of nearly 200 people in the university auditorium, one of the first eight-year-old speakers began her talk.
Over Spring and Summer 2011 we worked alongside the staff at Thorney Close Primary School, Sunderland, UK, on a hugely ambitious project: to see what happens when you give the TEDxKids format not to a bunch of adults to talk about what kids need, but to a bunch of real, live, unpredictable, unfettered kids. The project was a great success and culminated in one of the children’s published talks being picked as the TEDx Editor’s Talk of the week.
Creative Partnerships‘ Gayle Sutherland and Every1Speaks‘ Peter Hirst worked alongside us to make it happen. Behind this, though, were some even more ambitious learning goals for our work:
- Increase student confidence in speaking and listening throughout Years 3 and 4.
- Increase the confidence of staff and pushing their understanding of technology use in language teaching.
- Generate a sustainable, repeatable, cross-theme, cross-stage project.
- Provide a focus of ambition and confidence-building for students throughout the first quarter of 2011, and beyond.
- Help form a strategy for harnessing technology to the maximum in a low-bandwidth environment.
We challenged the school by asking what would happen in terms of ambition, outlook and understanding the power of speech if Thorney Close students created the UK’s first live and online event, created by children for children, as part of the world’s most famous and popular lecture series.
NoTosh provided the staff involved with the project an online space for them to record their learning journey throughout the process. With help from Creative Partnerships we encouraged them to reflect on their style of teaching and to record the milestones of this project.
We provided the school with teaching support that began by exploring the elements of storytelling and the ingredients of a great speech. We borrowed from our founder’s degree course – no, not the European Law bit, but the fairytales part. Ewan spent two years of his MA looking at the ingredients of great fairytales and so it was with a big book version of Red Riding Hood that we began exploring the nature of a great story and, therefore, of a great speech à la TED.
The teachers were also introduced to a wide number of the TED talks and encouraged to discover, view and discuss a even more amongst themselves and with their students. Carefully selected examples were then used with the classes and unpicked to reveal the elements of their success – as session starters and finishers, these talks provided a superb, uplifting means of involving everyone in the class.
We would start by watching videos without any audio, then have one of the students (or a small group) provide a live commentary, that is, the speech they think they would give to go with the images – Nathan was first up, but it’s still amazing to see how far he came in this project, from the shy, quiet chap here to the forthright young man we heard two months later at TEDxKidsSland. Finally, we’d let the students listen to the ‘real’ talk, audio and visuals, before discussing what they liked most (two stars) and what they thought could be made better (a wish).
Video Games to Stimulate Richer Language
We also used video games as a stimulus, the goal to encourage as much creative use of adjective and adverb, simile and metaphor as possible. Some of the results were astounding, and from students, we were told, not normally so confident and comfortable with such descriptive language. It was after a few sessions with Machinarium that many of the students couldn’t let themselves utter a noun without at least one apposite adjective. Many of our ideas in this realm are inspired by others leading the way, which Ewan has outlined over several years in his games-based learning posts. Here are some examples of what came out in those early stages with the game (more here and here):
I feel I am disowned, like a child getting adopted or a toy being thrown away.
I feel like I am going to dive into the night sky potion of smoke.
The noise sounds like a spaceship coming down to Earth.
I feel scared. What is this strange and exotic land anyway?
Through team teaching, example lessons, activity and project ideas we began to explore with the children what they would like to talk about. The Year 3 and 4 children were set the challenge of speaking passionately about a topic that is meaningful to them. At this point, our work concentrated on teachers’ questioning skills: if you ask your average eight-year-old what’s meaningful to him or her, the answer will invariably be “football”, “my hamster” or “mum”. Great questioning from the teachers swiftly, and sometimes painfully (!), moved almost all the students beyond these lower order solutions to “Have you ever wondered…?” questions that had most adults in the room pondering the students’ prospective answers with genuine interest.
Our project culminated with the Year 3 and 4 children organising and running TEDxKids@Sunderland. They were involved in every step of the process from applying for the license, setting up Twitter accounts to phoning around to book the venue.
So on May 27th in a lecture hall in Sunderland sixty 7, 8 and 9 year olds explored topics such as the secret language of animals, why slugs have slime and what family means – and made history in the process by participating in the first ever TEDx event for under 10′s.
We are still working with the teachers, students and parents to help them download, cut and publish their videos from the event, as well as learning logs from the process.
What they said:
Sue: Year 3 Teacher
We need to let go of the reins. Because it has been the children that have challenged me to be a better teacher. They have raised the bar every day of this project and it has been my job to keep up. I feel humbled by what my kids achieved and can’t wait till after the holidays when I can get back in the class and let them know how very proud I am of them. How proud I am to have been part of their groth as individuals. Proud to have shared this short , yet immense journey.Catherine: Head Teacher
The children proved that anything is possible and that they always rise to an occasion. It was lovely to see normally ‘quiet’ children find their voice. The whole Tedx experience has been a wonderful learning journey and one which has improved outcomes for many of our children.Lilian: Year 4 Teacher
Arrived home and STILL have that elated feeling. Can’t imagine how the kids are feeling too. They did a tremendous job today and I am certain have gained in confidence and are inspired to take on more creative and self directed learning in the future.
Thanks to the great help from Gayle Sutherland we were able to collect some great reflections about the journey the school took in completing the TEDx challenge, a project we undertook with them in the Summer of 2011. We also gathered a range of feedback from the pupils in a few different ways, including an emotion graph and single word responses.
Here are some of the reflections from the children:
“I didn’t think everyone would e-mail us on Twitter, from Australia and Canada and India – all over… It feels like we are important”
“My Mam’s never done anything like that before and she said I’d be quite scared, so did me Dad. But I got passed the nerves, I relaxed..”
“I actually liked the nervousness. It was weird. I was quite scared but happy as well – at the same time! I really enjoyed when I was actually doing it [the talk]. I liked the planning and stuff as well.”
“I thought that there should be less people, more like 50 than 250 – but now I have done it I’m glad there was so many. It was difficult. It did make you nervous.”
“I felt quite proud at the end of the event, that I had managed to do it.”
“I’m really surprised that ‘E’ and ‘L’ did – they are always very shy. They did it well ”
“People clapped and somebody shouted out ‘well done’ ”
“I didn’t think I’d be able to do it – not all the way through. If felt really good.”
“We learnt that kids can actually do TED talks”
“I think other children should get the chance to have the feeling we had. If they were nervous they might be shaking and maybe not do as well as us, but they might feel as good as we did at the end. It is a good thing for children to do.”
In addition here are some further thoughts about the process from the teachers involved:
“The pupils are much more confident. They’re much more able to express their ideas and not as conscious or self conscious that it’s what the teacher wants to hear. They’re much more able to stick their hands up, they’re having a go more. They’re a bit more confident in whatever their idea is. Whether it’s what I want to hear it’s okay to sort of have it said and if it’s right it’s lovely, great. If it’s not exactly what I want to hear that’s okay. They understand that you’ve added to the conversation, you’ve added to the discussion, you’ve brought something into the mix that might trigger off a thought from somebody else…..”
“I guess I am surprised at just how well they did. I always thought they could achieve it but how well they did and how some of them were real talkers there and that they gained a passion with it. I didn’t know if children could think of passion really, as something beyond what that they liked. But some of them were really passionate, they wanted to go and influence those adults in that TEDx talk hall. It’s not superficial what they’ve gone through or what they talked about about. Such as the girl talking about and making artificial sick, it was fun but she was also saying to people it doesn’t matter if you are sick, it is natural way to clear the body system. And under that again she was talking about the work impact, about how many people are actually off sick a year. So they’d really thought about the talks, which I thought was great.”
“I learnt to trust the children and to let them go in the direction they want, trust that they’re going make the right decisions with a little bit of guidance but not as much structure as we normally would give. So to sit back more and to listen more, and just ask the odd few questions – without waiting for that answer that the teacher wants to hear. Because when you ask a question it’s almost a case of them guessing what the teacher’s thinking, but in this there was no guessing what I was thinking; it was very much about what they were thinking.”
Here are some of the Wordles we produced after asking the children in Year 3 and 4 to share their feelings at the beginning of the project and then again at the end.
Year 3 and 4 Before
Year 3 and 4 After
In addition to this simple activity for the pupils we created a Google Form which asked pupils to score their emotions from 0 to 10 (10 being happy) at different points throughout the process. Although a simple method this allows us to find the mean average and to create an emotion graph like the one below.
