Developing Presentations

One key to developing effective presentations is being aware of your audience’s academic level or preparation. If your audience is primarily graduate students and you are teaching a seminar-type course at the graduate level, the depth of your presentation and the preparation that students will have will be clearly different from that of undergraduate students in a lower division course. Graduate students are typically more outspoken and engaged during lecture while undergraduates, especially freshman and sophomores, are more timid and less likely to interrupt your lecture to ask questions. Graduate students bring with them various academic and research experiences and thus their questions may be related to applications of the material. Undergraduates experiencing concepts for the first time are likely to have more fundamental questions. For undergraduate students, it is also important to understand the importance of your course to their degree program. Is it a foundation course required for their major, is it a general education elective, or is it an upper-division major course for students with a reasonably mature preparation? Regardless of the course, you should decide early on what you want the students to remember from the course as a whole and/or a particular lecture. Also consider how the students might utilize the material once they complete the course. For example, will the lecture content be important as prerequisite information for other courses in the major or a graduate or professional entrance exam? If your course is, in fact, a prerequisite for other courses, ask the faculty who teach the subsequent courses what concepts they expect your students to have mastered prior to taking their course. If your course is relevant to an entrance exam (GRE, MCAT, etc.) to professional or graduate school, familiarize yourself with the material on those exams by perusing preparation books available in a bookstore.

In an individual lecture, you should identify for yourself the “big picture” of the material as well as the key points that you want students to remember. Once this is established, you will need to structure and organize your lecture points and examples to support and reinforce these points. Another way to think about this point is to consider the following: “if the students remember only one thing in the next hour, what should it be?” For example, when I teach an introductory course in Organic Chemistry and we are discussing the addition reactions of carbon-carbon double bonds, I want the students to remember that the regiochemistry outcomes of such additions typically proceed according to the Markovnikov rule. In addition, the mechanisms for most additions are conseved so that they don’t need to memorize individual reactions and mechanisms, but rather they should be able to generalize the concept. Of course, there are always exceptions to generalities, but they represent a small percentage of what they are likely to encounter beyond my course.

Once you have established the key point and you begin to develop examples, analogies, stories, or data to reinforce the topic, you should also consider what might be the best mode of delivery. professor points to a diagram on the chalkboard For example, will the point be best learned by providing a table of data? Tables of data allow students to recognize trends and outliers or exceptions to the trend. Will an animation or short film drive home the point? Some concepts in chemistry require 3-dimesional appreciation and when the 2-dimensional format of a chalk board combined with your artistic skills fall short, overhead slides or computer animations are often exceptional complements. Ask other faculty how they deliver these concepts or check out multimedia sources that may be available at your AV department on campus or teacher resource catalogs. Will numerous examples applying a new theory reinforce the point? Applying a concept is sometimes the best way to appreciate it’s limitations and versatility. To own the concepts, it is often helpful for students test it it’s limitations. As an expert, you can provide them diverse examples that go beyond the scope of the textbook for the course. Although it is sometimes useful to recall how you first learned the material, you should recognize that students’ approach to learning is quite varied and that no single method should be regarded as a panacea. Ask your colleagues how they present particularly challenging material. Look for various forms of media available for topics in your discipline. It is likely that someone else has had the thought that “there must be a better way to present this material.”