Here are some considerations and suggestions to try and engage your students either before and/or during your presentations
Do you have a lot of slides to get through during your presentation?
- Realistically how long do you spend elaborating on each slide?
- Do the maths: is there enough time within the session for you to cover all the content and allow students to discuss and clarify understanding?
- Is there a way of reducing the content to be covered within the session so that enough time is provided to explore the core topic?
Do you provide pre-sessional resources for students to engage with prior to classroom learning
- Have you considered the use of video to introduce a topic before the session?
- Do you provide pre-reading?
- Try and consider how much you are asking students to do before the session; are there a lot of texts/papers?
- Could it seem over-facing and cause students to feel overwhelmed and disengage?
- Could you create a quick screencast of the basics / theory so the in-class session time can be more discursive?
- If you do this, do you then spend time in the session re-capping the content they should have already engaged with?
Gauging student understanding
- Do you allow sufficient time within your presentations to pause from your delivery and engage with students to check their understanding?
- Have you tried in-class polling / quizzes
- Do you ask students to work in groups to depict their understanding of the key issues (for example using mindmaps)? Do you ask students to create a resource to act as a learning resource for others?
How do you engage students within your teaching?
- What is the balance between the amount of talking you do and the amount of talking they do?
- Do you consider different ways to present key topics (e.g. graphics, short video clips)
- Do you use examples from practice?
- Could you use service user / client / customer testimonies to provide a different perspective and challenge perceptions?
- Do you ask students to share their experiences and perceptions (e.g. from placement)
- Do you ask students to work in groups?
- Could they collaborate and produce a resource / present their own findings?