The Art of Body Language: Communicating Without Words

An interactive lesson plan for teachers to design effective body language workshops

🗓 Time
December 2023 |  1 weeks
📌 Skills
Instructional design; Curriculum development; E-learning development; Content development
🔧 Tools
Articulate 360 Rise; Figjam; Canva
⭐ My Role
I led needs analysis and learning experience design using the Backward Design model, capturing my design process and the final lesson plan in an interactive Articulate 360 Rise project.
🎯 Purpose
Developed in partnership with a public school teacher, this work supports instructional planning for improving students’ body language and communication skills during classroom presentations.
view in Articulate Rise

Problem

The fifth-grade English teacher I partnered with noticed that many students struggled with body language during class presentations, showing limited eye contact, nervous gestures, and difficulty engaging the whole audience.

Solution

A two-part, video-based lesson plan that integrates teacher-led group activities and individual exercises. The key principles include social-emotional learning, active learning, gamification, metacognitive theory, and scaffolding.

The following graph illustrates how each step in the learning journey supports targeted performance outcomes.

Process

1️. Performance Analysis

According to effective public speaking, the goal of a presentation is to influence the audience’s perspective or emotions through an engaging delivery of information and ideas. To master body language, a speaker must develop the following competencies:

  1. Content Knowledge and Emotional Awareness: Thoroughly understanding the content being presented, including both the informational and emotional impacts intended for the audience.

  2. Body Language Understanding: Knowing the meanings and emotional connotations that different body languages convey.

  3. Confidence and Familiarity for Application: Being comfortable and confident to use body languages in group settings.

2. Learner Analysis

Through observations of student presentation recordings and interviews with the teacher, I identified four key performance gaps:

  1. Lack of Content Familiarity: Limited clarity with the information and emotions they aim to convey.

  2. Lack of Body Language Knowledge: Unfamiliarity with different body language cues and how they influence the audience's perception.

  3. Lack of Self-awareness: Limited awareness of their appearance and performance on stage due to perspective constraints.

  4. Lack of Confidence: Emotional barriers such as fear of making mistakes or receiving negative feedback from peers.

3. Learning Target Analysis

To bridge the gaps, I identified the learning targets using the Schwartz & Hartman Wheel, a framework that matches learning objectives, instructional strategies, and assessment methods with performance categories for effective design.

To achieve the main skill gain, I further broke it down into three sub-targets:

  1. Discernment: Differentiate between various types of body language.

  2. Explanation: Understand the communicative effects of different body languages, and develop familiarity with their content and stage performance.

  3. Attitude: Build confidence in using body language in presentation.

4. Assessment Methods Analysis

Using the Schwartz Wheel, I created focused assessments targeting each of the learning goals:

  1. Formative assessment for Discernment -- Noticing: Assess students' ability to identify and recognize different poses and gestures displayed by public speakers.

  2. Formative assessment for Explanation -- Inference: Evaluate students' capability to interpret the meanings behind different gestures and connect them to their own content.

  3. Formative explanation for Attitude -- Manner: Measure the extent to which students exhibit confident manners in using body language

  4. Summative explanation for Skill -- Performance: An overall evaluation of students' proficiency in applying their knowledge of appropriate body language during formal presentations

5. Summary

The following graph summarizes how different parts of the analysis connect and how they contribute to effective learning experience design collectively.