When I was in the classroom as a project-oriented teacher, I always struggled with Presentation Days. You know those days… it’s at the end of a long cycle of project-making when the students get up in front of the class, one after the other, and present their projects.
And, let’s face it, it often bores the living snot out of the kids — and the teachers.
And the frustrating thing is that can happen even when the projects the kids created are really cool. But too often, Presentation Days consist of 8 to 10 (or more) groups coming up and giving very similar styled presentations about their projects, each about 5-10 minutes long, and before you know it, your class and you have sat through a period or two of being talked at from the front of the classroom. As a teacher, I did this to the kids more times than I’d care to admit.
And the funny thing is, I’d never make my students listen to lecture for that long from me.
Presentation is a skill — and it’s not one that schools teach all that often explicitly. And before we subject our students to another day of half-listening to their peer’s projects, we should think about how we frame the act of presentation, the art of listening, and thoughtful presentation design that minimizes boredom.
Some thoughts on creating meaningful end of project cycle experiences, then…
Class structure:
There are ways to have students get the full effect of other students’ work without a parade of PowerPoint presentations at the front of the room –
Read-arounds – where each group/person has to read the work of two other groups/people and write a response. Using a learning management system can make this process transparent for everyone as well.
Teach-in stations – where students go from station to station and at each station, students are presenting work and doing a poster-session style presentation. Do this in thirds where there are three rounds of poster session and each group presents once and walks around twice. You can have students fill out exit tickets of things they learned from other students’ presentations – again, if that’s done online, it can then create a shared compendium of student learning and reflection.
Critique / Gallery Walk- take a page from the art world, and have the work either digitally or physically available to all members, and have them go from piece to piece and give feedback. (Even digitally, this can be fun to do in physical space so that students can get up and move around.)
There are ways to make the front of the room more exciting too – and there will be times when you want every student / group to do a presentation to the entire class:
Ignite-style: A sense of urgency is an awesome thing, and the Ignite style presentation (20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds) makes for a fast-paced, fun presentation that communicates ideas powerfully with a sense of energy and purpose.
Multiple manifestation of presentations: Give students the options of how they want to present – skits, simulations, videos, even PowerPoint, poster – there are many ways to communicate ideas to a crowd, and students should have the opportunity to experiment with multiple modalities. Often, SLA teachers still have students hand in a more comprehensive paper with the presentation so students can go into more depth as well.
Mini-lessons: If one of the purposes of having students present their projects is to teach their classmates, then why not have students actually create a lesson plan on how to teach their material? Students can create more progressive lesson plans for how to teach their students about what they have learned, complete with creating learning activities for their fellow students.
These are just some of the many ways to make the presentations of student work far more powerful as learning moments than having students lecture their classmates. I’ve seen SLA teachers and students create incredible learning experiences for each other using these techniques and many more. Much like every other part of project-design and inquiry-driven curriculum-design, thoughtful planning of Presentation Day on the front end will make for far more powerful learning when the day arrives.
Yes, yes and yes
As a student and current teaching intern, I couldn’t agree more with your blog on presentation day. I remember being not only afraid about presenting in form of the class in high school but also terrified at the amount of time we would spend listening to class presentations. I want to move away form that style as I transition to a full time teacher and I have to say that your blog was really informative. As part of my Master’s program we have done plenty of group work that needs to be presented (with our classes being three hours long) I found it refreshing when instead of having presentations we had critique/ gallery walk. I still benefited form the work of my peers and I was also more aware of what was being presented on the poster (it definitely helped to walk around.) I am looking forward to implementing these great suggestions you had in my classroom and allow my students to benefit from these strategies while at the same time learn from their peers.
Also have a look at segmentation theory. It basically says that attention spans are finite so for longer – 1 hour lectures no one activity or segment should be longer than 8 minutes. But for shorter 10 minute presentations I have the students segment every 2-3 mins. That means sometimes talking, sometime showing vids, sometimes interacting with the audience etc but all in 2-3 minute chunks.
Back in the days of the ad business, using live talent for tv and ad commercials, people, kids, cats, and dogs. the human element was often helped by creating the sense of it being a “scripted show’, and I its “director”. People had lines, marks, cues, etc. Dogs would work for food and cats, well, being cats, would often run away.