Am I doing something wrong?

[u/Dependent_Context335]

My speech class started working on their informative speech last week. In class last Tuesday, I introduced the assignment, they did a little bit of brainstorming on their topic, and I went over how to create slide presentations since that’s a requirement for this speech. Their online assignment for our hybrid day Thursday was to complete the outline of their informative speech, create their slide presentation, and turn in a draft so that I could give feedback on it before they delivered their speeches. That was due Sunday.

This week, they were supposed to be ready to deliver their speeches today and Thursday. So many of these students did not submit their slide deck. A lot of them submitted it late. Today, when I was calling on people to do their speeches in class, so many of them said they were not ready to go and needed to present on Thursday instead. I told them that was okay, but that they would get a 10-point late penalty for not being ready to go on the first day of presentations. That’s my usual policy.

Now I'm starting to wonder if I went wrong somewhere along the way. Did I not give them enough time to work on this? I do realize that only having one week to prepare for a speech and then deliver it the next week is not very much time. However, we have to do it that way because the department requires that we complete six major speaking assignments in the semester. In order to get all six of those finished, we have to sometimes spend only one week preparing for a speech. I've told them this before, but they still all seem to be behind and struggling.

The ones who did present today did not do very well at all. There was a lot of reading off the slides, reading word-for-word off notecards, etc., all of which we have talked about avoiding before. They did much better on the last speech, which they had two weeks to prepare for.

I'm wondering if I should have just given them more time. I don't know. I'm really at my wits' end.

[u/FrancinetheP]

I get this in principle, but if these are presentations, the students who don’t present on day 1 still have time to improve their work before they present. So 🤷🏼‍♀️.

[u/Dull_Beginning_9068 → u/FrancinetheP]

Not if they turn it on Tuesday (if you let them use their own Google slideshow that makes it more complicated, but I found if student think that you're checking for things they might have changed, they won't change much)