Interesting article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education:  Perfecting Your Vocal Technique; You May Resist the Notion of Teaching as a Performance, but Your Classroom Voice Can Help or Harm Student Attentiveness, by James M. Lang:

As much as we might want to resist the notion of teaching as a performance — thinking that our focus should be on student learning — it can’t be denied that our voices, gestures, and movement in the classroom can help or harm student attentiveness. …  It might help to think about this issue as one of communication rather than performance. Strong skills in voice and movement can help illuminate our questions and ideas for students, drawing attention to what matters, holding their attention through a long class, and making a deep impressions on their minds.

Few of us have time to take courses on vocal delivery or effective performance, and we might feel that time spent improving our course content would make a greater difference to our students. But improving your teaching performance does not require a massive outpouring of time. It begins with becoming mindful of the issue and your own habits. And then it is simply a matter of following some basic guidelines and paying attention to how you speak and move.

Here is a vocal technique you might try. I first heard this advice in a teaching workshop given by Ann Woodworth, an associate professor of theater and an acting teacher at Northwestern University. Woodworth asked participants in her workshop to stand up and deliver the opening few lines of a lecture in their discipline. As they repeated the same lines over and over, she demonstrated how often we speak as I described above — losing steam throughout the sentence and falling away dramatically on the final words. She also pointed out multiple instances in which speakers skimmed over or de-emphasized the crucial words in a sentence, placing emphasis instead on less-important parts.

[Here are] two very practical tips you can follow when you are speaking:

• Place the emphasis in your voice on the nouns, verbs, and key concepts of a sentence.
• Build the sentence to an emphatic conclusion, rather than letting it trail away.

Try to read the following sentence aloud, placing the emphasis as I have indicated: Content matters, but how we communicate that content to our students (pause; big finish) also matters. The point is to draw the listener’s attention to the meaning-carrying elements of the sentence. …

Obviously, becoming a more polished speaker does not necessarily make you a great teacher. But it can make you a better one.