Getting Creative With Student Presentations

As a teaching consultant with NJ Teacher to Teacher, I recently had the opportunity to assist a school district in implementing their sixth-grade social studies inquiry initiative. This enabled me to see the creative ways teachers are meeting the challenge to increase academic rigor, districtwide.

As part of this initiative, I observed one teacher with separate groups of sixth-grade students each researching various aspects of what makes a society complex. The teacher planned to have each group present their findings to the rest of the class the next day, in turn, standing and delivering. 

With this type of “sit and get” presentation, I often see too many students in the audience both losing focus and becoming restless, particularly when students who are presenting are not engaging. After I reviewed the next day’s lesson plan with this teacher, she decided to forgo sequential student presentations and instead opted to embed a jigsaw discussion activity.

It was exciting to see how her students further extended their thinking by partnering with one another in academic discourse, as well as the teacher’s joy in noticing how engaged the students were in learning from and with each other. 

Over time, in helping educators engage students in varied ways, I have learned that teachers might want to consider the following points when having students present their work.

Turn Presentations into Student Discussions

Jigsaw is not the only way to increase student discourse and have students make meaning of their learning. Gallery walks, inside/outside circle activities, and give one–get one discussion protocols also serve as effective strategies. In turning formal presentations into discussions that involve all students equally and simultaneously, there’s opportunity for all students to ask clarifying, probing, and extension questions, and to add their own ideas and knowledge to collective understanding. 

This can deepen overall student retention of learning, add an element of physical movement in the classroom, and reduce performance anxiety, particularly for introverted students as well as those with learning and language challenges, which comes with being “onstage.” Teachers also can circulate around the room, as students converse in pairs or small groups, providing feedback. 

Go Digital

As host of the Have a Life Teaching podcast, I had the chance this season to chat with John Arthur, a sixth-grade Utah teacher of the year and author of The Digital Projects Playbook. On this episode, Arthur mentioned that his motivation for ultimately creating a classroom that elevates student voice, through digital projects like these student-created videos, was his troubling observation as a new teacher that the only thing his students could do with their print work, after it had been graded, was to share it with family or toss it because “the cycle of learning was over.”

Student work, and presentation of that work, doesn’t have to be “sit and get” or part of a closed learning cycle. Rather, amplify discourse around students’ work beyond the school community, with student creators at the center of the dialogue, by presenting and publishing student work on social media as a blog, podcast, recorded seminar, narrated PowerPoint presentation, or video.

Educators should review permissions and privacy laws and, if time is short, start small by having students create blog posts and/or record webinars using slide decks before moving on to video production. Creating such an online repository of student work helps students track their thinking over time and can assist learners in developing the digital skills they’ll need to thrive in their personal and professional futures. 

Consider the Goals for Both Presenters and Audience

There still are times when a teacher might want students to make formal presentations. In those cases, Robyn Brinks Lockwood, an advanced lecturer at the Stanford University Language Center and author of Making Academic Presentations: What Every University Student Needs to Know, suggested on my podcast that teachers should instruct students on using higher-order presentation moves such as using visual aids and employing specific language to frame the purpose of the presentation. They also need to know how to manage an audience, particularly when someone asks a question to which the presenter does not know the answer. 

Brinks Lockwood added that teachers need to consider how to maximize audience engagement during these presentations. A good general practice is to provide audience members with rubrics or checklists to help them critique each presentation. Presenters also don’t need to stand behind a lectern to deliver a presentation, says Brinks Lockwood. Rather, middle and high school teachers might consider having students deliver poster presentations and/or have panel discussions with audience members strategically interrupting during presentations and/or having academic discussion about it afterward.

Student audience members should also be able to ascertain the purpose of a presentation from the language framing the presenter uses. If students had these skills both as presenters and as actively engaged audience members, Bricks Lockwood believes they would be better able to engage in interactive presentations at the university level. 

Allow for Preparation and Time Requirements

Educators need to explicitly teach presentation skills alongside academic content to maximize the learning opportunities that come from presenting and engaging in academic discourse. 

It takes time to create evaluation rubrics and peer and self-assessment documents, train students as moderators and discussion co-facilitators, and help students create projects and presentations digitally. And preparing students to effectively engage with presentations may take more time than the presentation or academic discourse itself, but the payback to teachers—and students—comes in the form of deep student learning.