The Gallery Walk

Purpose: The Gallery Walk assignment gives you the opportunity to practice your informative speech 4-5 times in front of your peers and instructor before the day on which you are assigned to speak. The Gallery Walk will help you achieve three objectives:

§ It will give you a crucial opportunity to demonstrate and to “tune” your ability to craft a preparation outline and from that a “key-word” presentation outline.

§ It will give you essential feedback from your audience and the instructor on your topic, your research, and the arrangement of your speech.

§ It will give you valuable insight to your audience; to their values, beliefs and attitudes. It will also allow you to “connect” with your audience in an interpersonal and small group manner, before you address them in a “public” setting.

Description: The Gallery Walk includes three parts. First, before the day on which you are assigned to speak, you will prepare a keyword outline. Second, on your speaking day of the Gallery Walk, you will post your outline at one of the designated speaking stations in the classroom and deliver your speech. Your speech should be fully developed with an introduction, body, conclusion, and oral citations. Third, on the day you are not speaking in the Gallery Walk you will be required to be an audience member and offer oral and written criticism of your peers’ speeches.

Each day speakers will deliver their speeches and the remaining class members, will be split up into groups of audience members. At the end of 6 minutes, audience members will have 4-5 minutes to provide oral and written criticism of the speaker (I will provide post-it notes for written feedback). I will also be circulating, to ask questions, to make comments and to write my own suggestions on the outlines. After each speech/criticism session, the audience will shift to the next station. You will have the opportunity to deliver your speech in front of several different groups of students.

Feedback: Speech criticism will focus on invention and arrangement. The speaking style in this exercise, as these are “draft” speeches, will be less formal and more interactive in nature than in your actual informative speech presentations. I do not expect finished, “polished,” speeches. I do expect complete outlines.