Presentation Days are not sacred

Students presenting and doing other meaningful things on presentation day. Students faces have been happy-faced to protect their identities.

Main Entry: pro·ject pre·sen·ta·tions
Function: noun
Definition: a culminating event during which students present their work to panels that include parents, teachers, engineers, scientists, former and current students, professors, miscellaneous experts, etc.
Eatamology: This entry will focus on a specific thing I ate out of Kevin Gant’s brain about what students can do when they are not presenting. He told me and modeled for me that students do not need to watch all the other teams’ presentations – instead there are many other more meaningful things they can do during that time. See below. I also mention an observation I ate out of Merced’s brain in 2007 that suggests that teachers maybe need to stay away from some presentations too.
Date: July 6-10, 2009 and 2007.

Now that I’m setting down to actually write out what goes into a good presentation day – I’m realizing there is a lot that goes into it. There are strategies to assemble good panels, to help better prepare your students for presentations, to prevent single team members from monopolizing a team presentation, and more. There are enough things to occupy several blog entries – so that’s what I’ll do with this topic. This entry focuses on everything but the presentations. Mainly – what should students do when it is not their team’s turn to present?

Kevin blew my mind last summer when he matter of factly said that presentation day is not sacred – there is no reason for all teams to sit quietly and watch every other team’s presentation. For most projects, sitting through all the presentations is tedious for a teacher – it’s even more tedious for a typical teenager – which creates classroom management problems. Then he modeled for me a presentation day where teams had the option to either watch other team’s presentations or do other things such as: complete the evaluation for the training session, continue preparing for their team’s presentation, continue working on their team’s project, etc. It was easy to see why this way was better. The teachers spent less time shushing restless students. The students spent more time doing things they found personally meaningful.

Now I run all my presentation days this way. Teams who are not presenting have several other things to do to keep them occupied while they wait their turn. They prepare for their presentations, finish their products, catch up on their assignments, complete collaboration evaluations, etc. Some students even opt to watch a couple presentations to help them prepare for their upcoming presentations.

I even came up with other things for me to do than watch the presentations. I actually love watching the presentations – but more and more I am opting to not be on my classes’ panels because students give much more detailed presentations when their panels consist completely of outsiders to the project. Merced made this observation years ago and I’ve observed enough to believe that he’s right. As soon as a project insider joins the panel, the students omit a lot of detail because they often assume that the entire panel has the same level of inside info as the insider. To keep the level of discussion high when I am not on panel, I give the panelists lists of good questions that are aligned to the content in the projects. I ask the panelists to use these questions to gauge the level of preparation of each presenter. See below for an example.

Related tools: Here’s a link to a set of instructions I gave to panelists who were assessing presentations for the Stuntkid project: link. Here’s a link to the scorecard I ask the panelists to complete to assess my students’ oral communication skills: link.