Macarthur Anglican School |
605 Cobbity Road Cobbity NSW 2570
For Year 7 – 12 students from all HICES schools
For more information: admin@hices.nsw.edu.au
Teachers: Please visit the Staff page
After standout events in 2023, 2024 and 2025 with C3hange and Person of Change Awards, SpeechCRAFT 2026 will continue in this tradition, but will add a second date and regional location to the calendar to allow even more students to attend thereby inspiring them to use their communication skills to enact change in their world.
Once again “Dramatic Difference” will be facilitating both events, featuring a keynote speech by Dr Nicholas Flannagan on ‘The Intersection between Critical Thinking and Content Production’, with a focus on the importance of critical thinking in communication, empowering students to engage with the information they consume in a discerning manner in order to effectively and perceptively communicate.
Throughout the day students will participate in various sessions, with each session facilitating student engagement in an exploration of how they can utilise their critical thinking skills across different domains including problem solving, interpretation and interpersonal communication.
Visiting schools will be sent a conference prompt prior to attendance, so that students can bring current research to assist in their composition of the afternoon presentations.
With the rising importance for multimodal presentations, the final session, ‘Communicate’, will be the delivery and assessment of 10, group produced, 5-minute multimodal speeches, with a bonus marking category for creativity.
The winning group presentation will be awarded the C3hange Award.
A final individual presentation will be made on the day celebrating the talents of one individual Person of Change, who will be named as the best presenter for the conference.
HICES along with Macarthur Anglican School and Scots All Saints College, looks forward to welcoming you all.
Barbara Warren is a seasoned mentor, communication advisor, and public speaking coach, renowned for her dynamic courses in presentation skills training and public speaking. With over thirty years of teaching experience, Barbara excels in implementing strategic frameworks to drive success and happiness.
Her excellent reputation as a professional, innovative, and supportive leader is underscored by a significant track record in leadership development, customer service, strategic analysis, mentoring and organisational development. Barbara has nurtured executives, frontline managers, emerging talent, young people and future leaders, and is skilled and empathic in the challenges of media, presentations, negotiation and change.
Barbara brings extensive theatrical experience and learning management experience from a consulting perspective, leading organisation-wide training initiatives, developing teams, facilitating sales training, driving transformation, preparing candidates for awards and delivering customer service excellence.
Effective communication is a result of confidence. Students who have learnt to craft their speech to be concise, clear, and respectful towards those with differing opinions have obtained the most powerful tool to capture audiences: spoken language.
Self confidence in public speaking not only benefits learning, higher education but is quintessential for future employment. Whether the overall student ambition is to perform a Shakespearean monologue, Viva Voce, multimodal presentation, Ted Talk or participate in co-curricular speaking activities, learning to speak with confidence is an invaluable skill.
This 3C model of learning underpins the educational premise for the day, without losing the overall focus on the development of student efficacy in respectful and persuasive speaking. Students learn to communicate with one another and express their ideas about a social issue relevant to today’s youth. This highlights the importance of recognising that words and speaking powerfully can be the biggest catalyst for change.
Visiting schools will be sent a conference prompt prior to attendance, so that students can bring current research to assist in their composition of the afternoon presentations.
With the rising importance for multimodal presentations, the final session, Communicate, will be the delivery and assessment of 10, group produced, 5 minute multimodal speeches, with a bonus marking category for creativity.
The winning group presentation will be awarded the inaugural C3hange Award.
A final individual presentation will be made on the day celebrating the talents of one individual Person of Change, who will be named as the best presenter for the conference.
This revised program has been designed by Macarthur Anglican School and will be a reimagined and unique annual HICES Educational Conference.
After a pandemic pause of a few years, Macarthur Anglican School were thrilled to welcome HICES students back in 2022 for their renowned Speechcraft Day.
The day was facilitated by NIDA and students from across Year 7 – 12 participated in the four facilitated workshops.
The morning sessions, titled ‘ Public Speaking 101’ & ‘What’s your Story’, had a practical drama focus to help develop students’ confidence and speaking articulation.
The afternoon session, which focused on a group speaking task, was a favourite amongst students. Groups were devised from students across all the schools and they spoke about worldly concerns and their possible solutions. Topics included; ‘How can Teenagers properly contribute to environmental discussions?’ In 5 break out rooms schools voted for the best presenters to pitch their ideas to the entire conference (pictured above).
Overall the day provided students with an important opportunity to develop their public speaking skills while enjoying the company of other students from HICES schools.
Past expert facilitators:
The National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) is Australia’s leading centre for education and training in the performing arts.
At Speechcraft Day, NIDA’s Public Speaking and Telling Your Story workshops inspire students to consider…
What makes a great speech memorable? Is it the content, the delivery or the passion? Or is it the perfect blend of each?
Students also discover Public Speaking techniques to engage and enthral audiences and build their confidence to be that memorable speaker. Under the guidance of a NIDA expert develop skills in voice, movement, storytelling and presentation.
