10 How Do I Present?

Deborah was like a lot of her teaching colleagues, in that her favorite part of teaching was introducing a new unit to students. For Deborah, her lectures, slides shows, demonstrations, and other presentations in front of her students were when she came to life. Deborah knew that she was a frustrated thespian, that she would have preferred to act on a grand stage before vast audiences. But short of that wild and clearly unattainable aspiration, Deborah felt that teaching was a good substitute, so much so that presenting before students was largely why Deborah taught. Take away her class presentations, and Deborah would probably go find something else to do that involved putting her whole passion and personality on display. 

Presentation

Teaching always feels a lot about presentations. It is natural that the first thing a teacher may do when assigned a unit or course is to think about what they are going to say and do, more so than what the students must do. Your active engagement of students in behaviors approaching their final performance goal may be more important to student success than what you, as their teacher, say and do. Yet what you present to students to prepare them for their task still remains important, indeed a priority activity in your teaching. As a prior chapter has already suggested, you have a wider range of presentations with which you can begin instruction, than you may traditionally think. This chapter addresses those options for what behavioral psychologists would call presenting, antecedent, or discriminative stimuli, those things that begin a student’s process of learning. Choose wisely. Your teaching success may depend on it.

Preparation

Before launching into a presentation of some sort before students, a teacher should first ensure that students are mentally, emotionally, and academically ready for the presentation. Don’t start a presentation until you have oriented students to the task. They are not passive recipients of whatever you present. They should instead be actively processing whatever stimuli you present, which means that they must be in the mood to pay attention and have the wherewithal to concentrate. You should also have focused your presentation to address the unit objective, about which students should know. They should also have completed any reading or other activity necessary for them to benefit from your presentation and should have whatever recording tools, whether paper and pen or laptop computers for instance, they need to capture, organize, and preserve what they prioritize and comprehend. The lighting, sight lines, amplification, air temperature, and furnishings should also be adequate for attention. Ensure that you have prepared students to benefit from your presentation. 

Cognition

Beyond preparation, also consider the student’s cognitive framework within which presentations play. Presentations must begin by capturing student attention. Students must then identify the priority knowledge within whatever is going on in the presentation. What is the student to extract from what they see and hear? Students must then interpret the priority knowledge into a cognitive schema, scaffold, or framework that they already hold. You cannot, for instance, present in a language foreign to students. They must already understand enough of your constructs to hold the new knowledge comprehensibly in mind. Students should then elaborate and enhance the new knowledge because by doing so they strengthen their comprehension and increase the probability of remembering and retrieving the new knowledge. Students then benefit from evaluating the new knowledge as to its sensibility, usefulness, and morality. Students may then prepare to deploy the new knowledge in problem solving and express it in communication. Various presentation techniques can help students accomplish each of these progressive cognitive stages. Learn and deploy those techniques to increase student benefit from your presentations. 

Reading

Assigned readings are a form of presentation. You may not be reading the assigned text aloud, although doing so is appropriate at some levels and in certain situations. But you can imagine that assigning a reading that students must complete is the rough equivalent of you presenting the reading’s information. Indeed, some teachers and students do well enough with assigned readings not to need substantial other presenting stimuli, whether lectures, slide shows, demonstrations, or the like. You’ve likely encountered the especially capable readers who don’t need much if anything more. Your selection of the text, including its content, organization, accuracy, clarity, and readability level appropriate to students, can be critical to student success. Your determination of the quantity and timing of reading can likewise be critical. Assign too much, too little, or the wrong reading, and you’ll mislead students into believing that they have prepared, when they haven’t. How students read for effectiveness is also critical. See the guide Help with Your Studies for its chapter on how to read for effect. Help your students learn and follow sound reading practices, to make assigned readings useful presenting stimuli.  

Lecture

Lecture is a dominant form of presentation in traditional instruction. That is so in part because a lecture can be an efficient form of instructional delivery, whether or not a lecture is effective. A school can seat 25, 50, 100, 200, or even 400 students in a classroom to listen to a distinguished lecturer, or even record and project the lecture asynchronously to thousands of students in a single term or across several terms. Good lecturers give clear, articulate, well-organized presentations that highlight the priority information within a structure made clear by headings and subheadings. Better lecturers package the new information in digestible chunks and space those chunks to allow for student processing. The best lecturers offer encoding variability, subtly approaching the topic from multiple perspectives to enhance student comprehension, interpretation, elaboration, and evaluation. Effective lecturers also often include visual imagery (see the section below on slide shows) and use rhetorical questions or actual interrogation to encourage student elaboration. Lecturers should also have sound presentation practices, avoiding distracting movements, mumbling, and verbal tics, while projecting a positive or even passionate professional persona. Work on your lecture techniques. Students can benefit from your improvement. 

Discussion

Lectures can lead into student discussion, as a related form of presentation. As already suggested above, frequent pauses to question students may help students catch up, comprehend, and elaborate. Student responses to questions, and your confirmation or correction of those student responses, can also help clarify and confirm comprehension. Student responses may also lead to back-and-forth discussion, either between you and the student or among students, that further elaborates the topic, while also leading to its useful application and evaluation. Socratic examination of students involves a special form of discussion in which the teacher continually poses questions challenging assumptions behind each student response. Socratic dialogue can significantly broaden and deepen student consideration of the subject, even if it may not necessarily sharpen student understanding and recall of specific factual points. To engage all students in discussion, you may divide the class into discussion groups or offer an online chat forum, with or without participation requirements. Whether discussions aid learning or not, they give students opportunities for active engagement. Use discussion to enliven and deepen your presentations. 

Slides

Teachers often support lectures and discussions with a slide show or other visual presentation on a whiteboard, smartboard, or similar display surface. Visual presentations backing up a lecture can substantially increase student attention and comprehension. A well-drawn image or graphic organizer can be worth a thousand words. Give considerable thought and attention to the content, form, number, and timing of your slides or other graphic presentations, supporting your lectures and class discussions. Beware, though, how slide shows can distract from learning. Too many slides, with too much information, and with distracting images that entertain rather than inform, can produce a cognitive overload for students, who will then no longer listen to your lecture or retain the priority slide information. Lecturing inconsistent with the presented slide information, or paraphrasing slide text while students are trying to read and interpret it, can likewise produce cognitive dissonance and overload. Use slides discriminately and wisely. 

Demonstration

Class demonstrations are another common form of presenting stimuli. If your topic involves learning to solve problems, for instance, then your practice may be to show and tell students how to do so, using clear examples and a whiteboard, projector, or other display system. You might then call on students to demonstrate their own worked problems to the class, while you guide, correct, and encourage the student. Demonstrations may be appropriate not only for solving problems but also for using formulas, creating designs, coding applications, and conducting experiments and dissections. Demonstrations can be especially useful for students to learn skills such as public speaking, debating, singing, dancing, acting, playing sports, playing musical instruments, painting, sculpting, and building robotics or other models. Demonstrations are a key part of professional education programs that teach more-complex performances in law, medicine, counseling, social work, law enforcement, and other fields. Use demonstrations whenever students must embody and perform the instructional objective. 

Alternatives

The above paragraphs address the most-common forms of presentation. You have additional choices that move away from pure presentation and into more-active student engagement. You may, for instance, assign students to present on topics, so that the presenting student gets skills practice and immersion into the topic, while the students observing the presentation should benefit from its content. You may alternatively supply handouts or online programs for students to complete during class time, that combine presenting stimuli such as short readings, maps, and diagrams with questions to answer or problems to complete, while you monitor and guide their individual work. You may alternatively require students to work in pairs on your guided designs, allowing students to choose partners or forming pairs deliberately to encourage student mentoring. You may also design similar group work or guided experimentation that includes presenting stimuli. Even if you stick mostly with lecture, slide shows, discussion, and demonstrations, a little variety including these other forms can freshen the classroom dynamic.

Duration

Carefully limit the duration of your presentations. Students may lose concentration and attention, and begin to experience cognitive overload and mental exhaustion, in as few as fifteen or twenty minutes of presentation time. If you feel compelled to lecture for longer, then consider dividing up your lecture into twenty-minute chunks with some form of active engagement using the lecture material in ten- to twenty-minute periods in between. You may be able to easily or readily lecture for much longer. Students may even willingly sit through your longer lectures. But appreciate that students may benefit less and less as your lecture proceeds. If you must lecture for longer periods, then consider giving students longer periods of active engagement in between lectures. Beware the temptation to make your teaching all presentation and no guided engagement with the topic you teach. Instruction should not be about you and the excellent lectures you love to give. Instead, keep instruction focused on student learning. 

Preservation

One way to reduce presentation time in class and increase active engagement is to record and preserve your presentations, whether they involve lecture, lecture with slide show, or demonstrations. When students are together in your classroom, they have the rare opportunity to work alone or with one another under your watchful eye with your skilled guidance. They should be able to watch your excellent lecture outside of class, as a homework assignment on their own time. They can even listen to your lecture as they exercise, work, rest, relax, or homemake, as their schedule permits, making good use of their limited time. If you arrange for students to observe or listen to your recorded presentation outside of class, and complete reading assignments outside of class, then you can use their limited and precious class time for their guided active engagement and productive interaction with one another with your tutorial support. Flip your classroom from presentation in and unguided engagement outside, to presentation outside and guided engagement inside. Doing so can lend a wonderful new energy to your teaching and classroom.

Limitation

The prior paragraph suggests a significant limitation to presentations in that they tend to be one way, from teacher to student. Presentations thus tend to require a kind of passivity on the student’s part, when students generally benefit from activity. Of course, you hope that students are actively thinking while observing your presentation or completing your assigned reading. But that hope presumes that students have the self-discipline and metacognitive practices to ensure their best learning, when students instead often lack that self-discipline and metacognitive practice. Those are other reasons to consider limiting your in-class presentations while increasing your in-class active engagement of students in the behaviors that they must learn and display. You need not necessarily deprive students of any of your presentation time or other presentation materials, if you are able to capture, record, and readily distribute those materials through your school’s online learning management system. Pursue the best of both worlds, both ample rich presentation and ample active engagement. 

Reflection

What is your favorite form of presentation? Do you enjoy lecturing? Does speaking in front of your class enliven you, drawing out your personality and passion? How much design do you give to your lectures? Do your lectures allow for student processing? Do you keep your lectures to a reasonable length so as not to exhaust student attention? Do you support your lectures with slide shows? If so, are your slide shows well designed to highlight priority information without distracting or overloading students? Do you try to reduce cognitive dissonance between your slides and your lecture, as you proceed? Do you include questioning and discussion in and around your lectures, to actively engage students while evaluating their comprehension? Do you deploy Socratic examination to deepen student thought and analysis? Do you offer in-class demonstrations of the skills and procedures that students must learn and deploy in your course? Do you record lectures and demonstrations for student access outside of class? Do you flip your classroom instruction so that students watch presentations outside of class and work collaboratively and under your guidance in class?

Key Points

• Teachers traditionally present material to students in common ways.

• Prepare students to make the most of your classroom presentations.

• Students follow a cognitive process to benefit from presentations.

• Your assigned readings are an important form of presenting stimuli.

• Design your lectures to support student processing of your stimuli.

• Include discussion around lectures to engage students actively.

• Support lectures with well-designed slide shows that don’t distract.

• Use demonstrations to help students learn skills and procedures.

• Several alternatives can supplement traditional presentations.

• Keep presentations to a reasonable length to not exhaust attention.

• Preserve presentations on video or audio for student use and review.

• Recognize the limitations of presentations in not offering practice.

Read Chapter 11.