Group Presentation Rubric

By the time I give my students the rubric for their group presentation, we've gone over almost everything that's on it.  The only thing left is to put it all together.  The group presentation is where the students bring their entire argument into focus by putting all of their lenses and perspectives together.

Here's the copy that I hand out to my students:  PT1 GROUP PRESENTATION RUBRIC.  It's broken down into the specific skills that are included in each row.

How to Get a Great Group Presentation Score

After my students have watched the Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates videos that I use to introduce presentations, one of the things that I tell them is that a great presentation is never an accident.  It's always the result of reflection and practice.

1.  OUTLINE YOUR TALK AND TRY IT OUT

Once students have an outline, they can start to practice their presentations.  I encourage them to try them out at home, preferably in front of someone willing to provide useful feedback.  

This practice is the only way to figure out what works and what doesn't.  Don't be afraid to tinker with the presentation at this point to ensure that it works fluidly. 

2.  PRACTICE WITH YOUR GROUP

Once students feel comfortable with their parts of the presentation, they should definitely practice with their groups.  This is the only way to ensure that transitions between speakers are smooth - there's nothing more awkward than a group of presenters looking at one another nervously to determine who speaks next.  This goes a long way toward scoring well on the Collaboration row of the rubric.

Effective Presentations, Part II

I'm sharing a copy of the slides that I use to discuss effective presentations.  I publish this presentation to Google Classroom so that my students can refer back to it throughout the year.

EFFECTIVE PRESENTATIONS POWERPOINT

In the interest of not overwhelming my students with too many facts at once, I break this presentation up over the course of two days.  The first part concludes with the Amy Cuddy TedTalk.  In my last post, I discussed the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates Activity.

Here's an outline of the transcript that goes along with the presentation.

EFFECTIVE PRESENTATIONS OUTLINE

After teaching this lesson, I saw a HUGE improvement in the quality of the presentations and slides that my students have been putting together this year.

Effective Presentations

The ability to deliver an effective presentation isn't just an AP Seminar skill - it's a critical life skill. People who can communicate clearly are in demand in almost every industry.

Therefore, I spent a lot of time this year coming up with activities and lessons to teach my students how to put together a good presentation.  Today I'm sharing the activity that we started with.

First, I gave my students a copy of this HANDOUT.  Then I had them watch two presentations:

1.  Steve Jobs presenting the first iphone (we only watched the first 10 minutes of this presentation)

2.  Bill Gates presenting a new touchscreen

After we'd watched the two presentations, the students discussed the differences in body language, language, slide style and confidence of both speakers.

But here's the twist!

After we'd discussed the presentations, I told the students that they had one more thing to do.  They had to turn their handouts over and make two columns - one for the iphone and one for the touchscreen.  Then they had 2 minutes to write down as many facts as they could remember the speakers relaying about each.

When the time was up, every student had more facts about the iphone.  Most could barely remember anything about the touchscreen.

This activity was a great way to introduce the idea that a great presentation includes slides that are intended to assist the audience's understanding of the topic.  It's explained in simple, easy-to-understand language and it focuses on the most important information that the speaker wants to convey.

Effective Peer Review

I'll be the first to admit that I did not do a good job last year of teaching my students to peer review each other's work.

I thought it would be enough to teach my students about how their papers and presentations would be scored, hand them a copy of the rubric and let them start scoring.  Suffice it to say, the results were not good.   Students got contradictory advice - "This paper was great!  Good job!" would be scribbled next to "This paper was very weak."  I think most of my students would have agreed that the Peer Review didn't help them at all.

Which was sad, because peer review is a powerful tool when students apply it well.  Not only does it allow them to help one another - it also improves their own understanding of the subject matter.

Rather than scrap the idea of peer review,  I completely changed my approach.

1.  TRAIN STUDENTS TO PEER REVIEW

I realized that one of the the main problem was that the students didn't have a firm understanding of the how their papers were scored, so I started by breaking down the College Board rubrics into simpler to understand language.  I also focused on one Row of the rubric at a time.

The students read three sample IRRs.  Every day for about two weeks, we spent about fifteen minutes of class talking about how to score each paper in a single Row.  We practiced until the students were almost as well trained in grading as I was.

2.  LESS IS MORE

Once my students were trained,  I divided them into groups.  Each group consisted of 4 students who were considered the "experts" in a single Row.  When we had a set of draft IRRs, we divided them so that each group of students had a small number of drafts to read through and score in just their Row. By the end of class, the IRRs have circulated through each group and each one had an accurate score for each Row. In addition, the students left great feedback for one another on their papers.  Instead of comments like "This paper was weak,"  students got comments like, "you need to add another perspective to your argument" and "dont' forget to add attributive phrases to indicate the credibility of the author you're quoting."