by Kahan Kanuga
When I was in fourth grade, my mom entered me in a speech and debate competition because my cousin had won one. She had to push me into it, although I somehow kept competing long after that first competition. By ninth grade, I was taking private lessons, and the cost had reached a point where I began wondering why becoming comfortable in front of an audience required my family to spend so much money.
Private lessons gave me the opportunity to work on my specific weaknesses with someone who could give me individual attention. That kind of coaching made a difference for me, and I began wondering how students who didn’t have private lessons were supposed to develop the same skills.
In 2024, I co-founded Voices in Motion, a student-run program offering free speech and debate workshops alongside paid lessons. We’ve since worked with more than 300 students, and coaching them has made me question why classrooms so often assess speaking before teaching it.
My experience with competing and coaching gave me a new perspective on a familiar ritual. Consider the average class presentation: we spend a week making slides, present for five minutes, and are told to have more confidence and make eye contact. By the time another presentation comes around, we forget the feedback. That seems like an unproductive way to teach something that improves through repetition.
I play tennis, and I can’t imagine a coach showing a student how to serve just once before throwing me into a match. In tennis, and in nearly every other school subject or sport, most of our time goes toward practicing. Communication and speaking deserves some of that same patience.
The Education Endowment Foundation, which reviews educational research, estimates that oral-language teaching approaches produce an average of six additional months of academic progress, when measured through reading comprehension. The studies cover speaking and listening activities more broadly than speech competitions, giving schools a reason to make room for guided classroom discussions.
That practice could matter even more in the future. AI can already help students prepare presentations, while social media makes it easy to fire off an argument without ever hearing a response. This differs from actual conversations, where we have to answer questions we didn’t prepare for and actually listen to and consider the other person’s opinion.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 98.7% of employers valued communication while only 55.4% of graduates were proficient in that area. As technology changes the way we work, I expect the ability to explain our thinking aloud will become more valuable.
Schools could start with a 10-minute weekly exercise where students explain an opinion and answer a classmate’s question. A teacher could offer feedback on one thing to improve, then return to the exercise the next week. Students would progressively work on speaking the same way they work on writing.
Even though I enjoy tournaments, most people will use these skills in ordinary conversations long before a college interview or meeting at work. The fourth-grade me needed my mom to enter me in a competition to get started. Future fourth graders should have the chance to practice just by going to school.
Students attended a public speaking workshop hosted by Kahan Kanuga’s student-led program Voices in Motion. (Photo courtesy of Kahan Kanuga)
