Teaching presentation skills

Brief description of session and activities

We would like to facilitate a workshop that demonstrates to staff a practical method of teaching presentation skills to students. Both Anne-Marie and Laura have been involved in the development of different types of workshops to improve student presentation skills and confidence, and would co-facilitate.

The workshop method has been devised in collaboration with students. We would briefly describe the structure of the workshop to help staff understand how we teach the workshop. We would then invite them to actively participate in the workshop, which they could then deliver to students.

The workshop at the Learning and Teaching Day will be based on a training session devised for staff, piloted in 2013. A main aim of the staff training is to collaborate with different courses across the University, and reach as many students as possible.

The method includes presenting to a partner, critiquing your partner, presenting to a larger group, and giving and receiving peer feedback, with students and staff working together. We would use a reduced version to fit into the 45 minute time-frame.

We would then ask staff to reflect on the process, how effective it is in developing presentation skills, how easy it would be to teach to students and what they would do to improve it, including feeding in any insights from their teaching.

The training is based on a workshop devised with the Student Union to teach Course Reps skills in 2011. The workshop was then piloted in collaboration with the London College of Communication, for which we won a UAL Teaching Award 2013.

The workshop has proven to be effective with students. For the Student Union workshop, 100% said that they felt more confident about public speaking (16 students). For the workshop at LCC, 96% said they felt more confident about public speaking (78 students).

We will also promote a collection of Open Educational Resources developed to support staff in the delivery of training.

How will students be involved in the session?

It’s a workshop primarily aimed at staff though we would welcome any students wanted to attend.

What will participants take away from the session?

An understanding of how to teach an effective presentation skills workshop to students, an insight into the feelings that students have when presenting, access to Open Educational Resources to help support training, and a dialogue about how to teach presentation skills.