We indeed have a privileged position and have the exceptional opportunity to gift students with vital academic, professional and life skills. The ability to give good or even great presentations is one of these valuable skills.
Teaching presentations is fun and very rewarding so that we should endeavour to do this in the most productive way possible!
1. Knowledge & Experience
Presentations are an important part of business communication and thus an integral part of Business English. If presentations are included as part of an academic course and assessment, our role is to teach and assess this skill – to prepare students for their future professional life and careers.
We cannot expect students to be able to deliver effective, communicative and convincing presentations if we do not teach them how to do so. After all, you wouldn’t take driving lessons with a driving instructor who just tells you to drive the car when you’ve never sat in the driving seat before. The aim is to learn a life skill and pass an exam, and you not going to achieve this by having an instructor who can’t explain how to drive, use driving techniques or even knows how to drive.
So, teach on the basis of knowledge. Do the research. Learn about the skill of presentation and its role in business communication. Know why communication skills, devices and techniques are used and how effective presentations are structured and delivered.
Give presentations yourself and know yourself as a presenter so that students can benefit from your experience and insights.
2. Be Systematic
Organise and structure your materials to teach systematically and communicate this systematic approach to students. Decide what can be achieved realistically in the time you have within the framework of the overall objectives of the course, faculty and university. A systematic approach with concise targets orientates you and your students, giving everyone a sense of purpose, direction and progress.
Plan so that students are provided with the time and space they need to process teaching input, prepare presentations, reflect on feedback and be creative. Don’t be afraid of this downtime and don’t think you always need to be seen “teaching” or “lecturing”. You can always use downtime to coach students individually.
3. Size Does Matter
In your preparation, take account of the size of your class. University classes can vary in size and can be huge. In one university, the curriculum was designed so that I was fortunate enough to have one to one coaching sessions with postgraduate students – a luxury and everyone involved benefited – but otherwise I have taught classes that range from around 12 to 45 students.
If your class has as many as 30-45 students, this is not ideal in teaching language and communication skills. Nevertheless, don’t despair as presentations are doable with some planning and creative course design.
Address the issue. How are you going to give students sufficient time to practise and give and get feedback on their presentations?
It is possible but you need to plan how you divide the number into smaller groups when necessary. Clearly time is limited, but regular small group practice will produce results and improvement in performance. It is certainly better than not providing time for practice. I would recommend a flipped classroom approach so that students can firstly access theory outside of class or lecture time and actual teaching time is used to discuss theory and put it into practice.
4. Targets
Set achievable realistic targets for your students and link these to your system. You may not have the time and space in the curriculum to teach your students to be the next Steve Jobs but you can put them on the right road in the right direction by teaching them to give good basic presentations. Sometimes, the answer is just to teach the basics well and comprehensively.
Goal setting is motivational and fundamental in teaching, coaching and learning. You can also encourage students to set their own targets considering what they have learnt, preferences, personal style and feedback.
5. Feedback
Feedback is essential in improving presentation performance. Students process their ongoing knowledge and appreciation of presentations which in turn enables them to refine their own approach.
Teach students about how to give and receive feedback and link feedback to setting targets with a view to continuous learning and improvement. Opinions on presentations can be subjective so that students need to learn how to accept, reject and work on feedback to build a personal style.
Feedback can be given orally or in writing, using feedback forms with selected points or even blank paper. The best feedback is sometimes seeing yourself as others see you.
Everyone has a phone and filming individual presentation practice is straightforward and unobtrusive. Students can assess their own performance – self-reflection – in a suitable time and environment.