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Student presentations are a common feature of many courses, but presentation quality varies dramatically. Nearly every student has endured text-heavy PowerPoints read verbatim and doubted the credibility of a presentation’s content. Yet, student presentations are pedagogically important; they provide students with an opportunity to take ownership of an issue and improve their public speaking ability – a valuable, employment-related skill.
Faculty members often urge students to meet for assistance with their presentations, but only the outliers show up. Detailed instructions for producing quality presentations sometimes go unnoticed or ignored. Even dedicated, high-achieving students can miss the mark come presentation day. The end result is a waste of valuable instruction time. Fifteen minutes of ineffective student-to-student instruction multiplied by 25 student presentations equal six-plus person hours of lost learning.
Who is at fault? An episode of “The Apprentice,” which aired fall 2010, provides a possible answer. Donald Trump assigned two teams the same task. One team failed miserably. In the boardroom, Trump showed no mercy to Gene, who had done a poor job presenting, or Wade, the project manager who had selected Gene, but who had failed to verify Gene’s ability to perform this important task.
Each week Trump fires one person. Should Trump fire Gene, the unprepared presenter, or Wade, the project manager who failed to assure quality control procedures? In what was described as a shocking move, Trump fired both men. However, his decision was sound; Gene performed poorly and Wade, who is ultimately responsible for the quality of the show, failed to do his job.
What if a student performs like Gene? What should happen if a student provides erroneous, irrelevant, and unimportant information, fails to provide credible references, and is unable to provide answers to basic questions? Who should be "fired" – the student who delivered an unacceptable presentation, the professor who had no advance knowledge of the presentation’s content and allowed it to proceed during class, or both?
From my experience, requiring students to meet with the professor at least one week prior to their presentations in order to obtain permission to present is an effective method that dramatically improves student presentations and ensures more effective use of instructional time. It can be framed as a business meeting in which the vice president (professor) requests a meeting to review the work of the lead presenter (student) prior to presenting to an important client (the class). This meeting might even be graded. Certainly, a VP would not wait until the big presentation to evaluate the work of the lead presenter.
The purpose of these meetings is not simply to evaluate and approve student work. The meetings provide an opportunity to assist the student inside the "zone of proximal development"; I see what the student is able to do without assistance and what he or she can achieve with assistance.
At the start of each individual meeting I address an e-mail to the student and then add notes, links to videos and articles, and electronic documents archived in desktop folders. Although most undergraduates have grown up in the information age, many of these so-called “digital natives” do not demonstrate the ability to sift through data and identify what is important. Despite having mentioned in class that the founder of Wikipedia discourages academic use of this community-generated encyclopedia, it still appears on slides. Fortunately, each Wiki is left on the cutting room floor.
Determining the credibility of other websites involves asking students, “What do you know about this organization? What is their mission? Who is responsible for the content?” We explore the site to find the answers. Once a source is found to be credible, deciding what information to include is guided by the question, “Knowing that memory is imperfect, what will students retain from your presentation one year later?”
For presentations in my class, students must carefully select one or more videos and show clips that total five minutes. We discuss the credibility of the video and determine whether it repeats what the student will discuss. Viewing the video is essential. Prior to the adoption of my current policy, a student began to show an inappropriate video during his presentation. The video included profanity, and lacked any apparent educational value. I asked him to pause the video and explain why he chose the video and what we could expect to see. He replied, "I don’t know – I haven’t seen it." Now, before the video’s debut in class, I say, “Tell me about the video. Why did you choose this video and not another?”
During the meeting I ask students to answer the discussion questions they plan to use. Often, the questions are duds and their answers brief. We refine the questions with Bloom’s Taxonomy and higher-ordered learning outcomes in mind and generate discussion questions that are more likely to inspire passionate debate.
After three semesters of observational data, the improvement has been unmistakable, and the early results of an Institutional Review Board-approved study indicate that 84 percent of students agree or strongly agree that the meeting was beneficial and 77 percent agree or strongly agree that the meeting helped them to avoid procrastination. One student who had completed over 70 credit hours wrote, "This was the first required faculty-student meeting I have encountered in my college career. It was highly beneficial…. If there was no meeting, my presentation would have been a major disaster." A graduate wrote, "By setting an earlier 'due date' I avoided throwing together a presentation the night before I actually had to present it." The highest compliment came from a student who blurted out in class, "These are better than many professors’ presentations."
I have found a number of benefits to required meetings with students beyond the improved quality of the presentations themselves. These face-to-face meetings typically leave me with a greater sense of a personal relationship with the student, and I would venture to say the feeling is mutual. Taking the time to meet outside of normal class hours clearly indicates to students that the professor cares. It also gives them a better idea of the rigor that underlies the peer-review process – how their professors’ scholarship thrives on the constructive criticism of others – and how this can ultimately elevate the quality of their own work. Finally, it might be considered a “high-impact practice” that opens minds and improves retention. Although there may be no panacea for subpar student presentations, the lesson I learned from "The Apprentice" – that I am at least partially accountable for the quality of student’s presentations – has improved the classes I teach and the quality of my relationships with students.
