In this article, the author examines the added value of strengths-based interventions in response to her college president's challenge that an educator should not be simply out for a talk in teaching. She redesigned her dissertation experiment to measure the impact of strengths-based teaching in two classrooms of Introduction to Public Speaking course. Here, she presents an experiment in an Introduction to Public Speaking course with student-learning outcomes culled from course syllabi, instructors' manuals, literature, and the National Communication Association. A week after beginning the experiment, the author documented behavior patterns of the students in the strengths-based class and traditional class. These patterns are direct indicators of academic engagement and are supported by the literature on behavioral academic engagement.