How public speaking CPD can benefit teachers

One of my moments of greatest satisfaction as a school leader came when a teacher “mooed” at me on a rainy Wednesday morning in Belgium.

I should explain.

The scene was an Inset day at the International School of Belgium, where I had brought in professional actors to run a public speaking and performance workshop for staff.

It was for this reason that one of my most experienced colleagues was in the middle of an improvised skit, having been handed the role of a farm animal, and was committing to it with a dedication that suggested they had been waiting their entire career for such an opportunity.

A focus on public speaking

I had not brought the actors in because I wanted my teachers to perform or because I had a particular fondness for farmyard animal impressions, though. It was because I noticed something about my teachers.

Most of them were extraordinary in the classroom - confident, commanding, completely unbothered by twenty-something children waiting on their every word.

But put them in front of a room of parents, other adults or their own colleagues at a staff meeting, and something contracted. The voices that spoke with confidence in a classroom often disappeared or the teachers became visibly uncomfortable.

We train teachers in pedagogy, safeguarding, curriculum delivery and behaviour management, but nobody trains them to stand up and speak.

Discomfort is the point

We assume that if you are good with children, you will automatically be good with adults. Anyone who has sat through a parents’ evening knows that assumption does not always hold.

Yet the reaction when the actors arrived was exactly what you would expect. Arms folded. Polite scepticism. The look of a highly competent professional who suspects this is going to be a waste of a perfectly good Wednesday.

Teachers are used to being experts in the room, so asking them to improvise, take directions and do something physically unfamiliar in front of their colleagues gets them out of their comfort zone.

That discomfort, it turns out, is rather the point.

The actors did not run a presentation skills course. They worked on the body before the voice - breathing, posture, what to do with the nervous energy that normally has nowhere to go.

The use of improvisation was deliberate because it strips away the safety net of preparation. You cannot hide behind notes in the middle of an improvised farmyard scene; you simply must be there, fully, whether you want to or not.

A subtle but clear shift

The shift was not an immediate one. Nobody walks out of a single training day transformed. But in the weeks that followed, the same teachers who had sat with arms folded that morning were the ones speaking confidently in staff meetings. Assembly presentations became more assured.

One colleague told me afterwards that in 18 years of teaching, nobody had ever shown them how to do that. They were not talking about acting; they were talking about how to combat nerves before public speaking.

I have not yet had the chance to run the same actor-led training day here at Cambridge International School Bratislava, where I am now director - though it is firmly on my list.

What I have done, however, is introduce LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) examinations for our students.

This is because I believe that drama teaches skills - to both children and adults - that are invaluable for life. If a school is serious about developing the confidence to speak in public, that conviction should run through the whole institution - for students and staff alike.

Why oracy trumps AI

Which is really the argument underneath all of this. As AI gets steadily better at producing competent written work such as reports, essays, lesson plans and presentations, the skill that remains stubbornly human is the one that Inset day was built around.

The ability to stand in a room in front of people who are watching and judging, and make what you have to say worth their attention.

That is not just a classroom skill; it is the parents’ evening skill, the difficult conversation skill, the whole-school assembly skill. The teachers and students who can do it will simply have an advantage that no AI tool can hand to anyone else.

The cow incident, for what it is worth, ended in applause. The teacher took a small bow. Somebody made a joke about her hidden talents in animal husbandry. The morning moved on.

But they had stopped being afraid of the room. And three weeks later, in an ordinary staff meeting, they were the first ones to speak.