Presenting on presentation tips

Deciding to give a presentation/workshop on good presentations is pretty daunting, as you have to try to practice all the things you are preaching (building on some tips shared here).

From presentation to workshops

I recently had the opportunity to share some ideas on effective presentations to groups of students and fellows (including at Duke and Harvard). In the spirit of more interactive presentations, I turned the presentation into a mini-workshop to help audience members make a concrete plan for their next presentation.

The version of the slides I share here–old-school animation and all–was for a 90-minute workshop. I delivered these via Zoom and worked in ‘share partial screen’ mode, so that I could edit the “share” slides live with ideas from the audience.

Building skills in class

As in previous teaching, I have tried to incorporate two additional components to encourage follow-through and to build workplace skills. These draw on behavioral science as well as my personal experience that you learn to do something better by considering and critiquing others’ efforts (i.e., grading papers makes me a more thoughtful writer).

1. Leveraging the idea of an implementation plan, I had students take a moment towards the end of the workshop to write down specific ideas for where, when, and with whom they will take specific actions (in this case, practicing a presentation).
2. Giving students an opportunity to learn how to give and receive feedback–a key professional skill. During presentations that follow from this workshop, classmates/audience are asked to use a simple feedback framework while listening to their colleague’s presentation: to write down at least one, concrete thing that the presenter should (1) continue, (2) start, and (3) stop doing the next time they present. The assignment then becomes for the feedback-recipient to synthesize this feedback, prioritize what they want to work on for the next presentation, then develop an action plan on how to do so.

Setting student expectations

Perhaps it is useful to share: this presentation was about 15 hours of prep work. There’s more I can do with it and now have a solid foundation–but it may be useful to share with students, etc., how long different tasks (can) take so that they can start to budget time properly.