Working with ENV: Making Presentations (I) 

March 01, 2012.
Form 11

1. Lesson/task description before

Aims

Subject matter: 

• change learners’ attitude to public presentation from ‘superficial’ to ‘thoughtful’;
• change learners’ vocabulary use in the presentations connected with environment from ‘specific vocabulary is not used’ to ‘specific vocabulary is used’. 

Thinking:

• change learners’ awareness about a variety of features of successful presentation from ‘typical small set’ to ‘a longer list of typical and non-typical features’; 
• change learners’ ability to describe successful presentation from ‘mention a list of features’ to ‘attempts to group features under parameters’.

Materials/tasks I am going to use

• Presentation of Hans Rosling “The Magic Washing Machine” taken from TED.com - http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html

2. Lesson/task description – after

Procedures (how we worked: time, organisation, etc.)

Background information
During around one month we were working on the topic “Environment” covering such sub-topics as air, water, soil pollution, and biofuel. Students also covered the topic of alternative fuels on their lessons on Physics. They will have to talk about this topic with the representatives of one international organisation who will visit the school in spring.

Lesson 1
Instead of writing a test on the topic I offered students to make presentations which will be evaluated. I also suggested the context for these presentations. To tune-in I asked if students knew how global environmental issues are dealt with in the world? How do countries agree on these questions? For instance, if they want to agree on something with the teacher, they have lessons, breaks and consultation hours to discuss questions and agree on something. After collecting some ideas I introduced the United Nations organisation and we had a short talk on the UN Conference on environment and development and other summits that UN organises. So I said, that the context for their presentation will be: You are delegates from Latvia who present at the UN Conference on Environment and Development. You want to address the audience with the speech “What have we done to the Earth” (line from Jackson’s song “Earth song”, which we listened to during one of our lessons) during which you raise your environmental concerns and offer solutions.
Then, I said that I did not have any criteria for evaluating their presentations. So what we had to do is to collect the criteria. For this purpose, we had to understand what makes a good presentation (what are the features of a good presentation). Thus, I would show them one presentation which I believed is an example of a successful presentation for which I would give a highest mark. Their task was to watch the excerpt from this presentation and put down a list of things they noticed that make this presentation a good example.
We watched an excerpt from Hans Rosling’s “The Magic Washing Machine”.
Then, students were giving features they noticed and I was collecting their ideas on the board and they were writing them in their notes. Sometimes, when students had no more ideas, I was asking guiding questions, for instance, “what about the slides, what is so peculiar about the slides he is using”, etc. The following is the list of features students came up with:
· Speaker gives facts
· Speaker gives arguments
· Speaker gives examples
· Pronunciation is correct
· Grammar
· Speaker uses some terminology (explains/shows terminology)
· Eye contact
· Speaker asks rhetorical questions
· Speaker makes jokes (makes people laugh, but the topic is serious)
· Speaker is performing a little bit (as an actor)
· Intonation is varied
· Does not use much text on the slides
· Speaker has special introduction
· Speaker smiles

Students home task was to find at 5 presentations that they think correspond to the above criteria and bring 1 presentation with them for discussion.

Lesson 2
Students brought presentation which they found to be successful and corresponding to the criteria of a well-done presentation. We watched excerpts from 3 presentations they brought (Steve Jobs “Apple Announces iPad (Part 1 of 10)”, Richard St.John “What leads to success”, and Janet Echelman “Taking imagination seriously”) and after each excerpt I asked to name more features they noticed which made the presentation successful. As the result, the following features were added to the list:
· The speaker is giving advice
· uses quotes of famous people
· speech is easy to understand
· speaker is connecting ideas logically
· speaker is showing impressive photos
· repeats important facts/information
· uses strong adjectives

Then I said that so far we have only features and they cannot be easily used for assessing their presentations. We need to group them and make them user-friendly. This was the most difficult part as I myself didn’t know how the final result would look like. I deliberately didn’t prepare any ‘final result’ at home because I wanted to remain flexible to students’ suggestions. (Note: right now I understand that one of the problems was the absence of activity for students. It was a whole-class oral discussion; I was not ready with the steps to be offered to students which would involve them in the activity. This still remains my problem).
In addition, I told students that I will have to give a number of points for every feature, from 1 (not true/present at all) till 4 (absolutely true/present).
The procedure of grouping looked as follows. I picked up the first 2 features “gives facts and gives arguments” and asked how can we name that? What ‘part of presentation’ am I describing with these features. Someone told “Content”. So we put it under content. Then we went through other features and tried to group them. As a result we got the following division:

Content
· Speaker gives facts
· Speaker gives arguments
· Speaker gives examples

Language use
· Pronunciation
· Grammar
· Speaker uses some terminology (explains/shows terminology)

Behaviour while speaking
· Eye contact
· Speaker makes jokes (makes people laugh, but the topic is serious)
· Intonation is varied
· Speaker smiles

The following features remained non-identified during the lesson:
· Speaker asks rhetorical questions
· Speaker is performing a little bit (as an actor)
· Does not use much text on the slides
· Speaker has special introduction
· The speaker is giving advice
· uses quotes of famous people
· speech is easy to understand
· speaker is connecting ideas logically
· speaker is showing impressive photos
· repeats important facts/information
· uses strong adjectives

When doing group-division I also paid attention to the 1-4 marking, asking what kind of question I should ask myself as a teacher to be able to give points? For instance, for “Speaker gives facts” the question will be “Does the speaker give facts”?
Students home task was to finish the grouping and before making presentation be able to present evaluation criteria.

Learners’ response and outputs (how they responded to the task and what they actually did in the lesson)
When students were asked to watch the presentation of Hans Rosling and find features they got actively involved in telling me why the presentation was a successful one. I liked that they paid attention not only to ‘how’ the person presents but to ‘what’ he says as well. I think my weakest part is that I do not manage to make students do things. What they did during the 2 lessons were watch, voice ideas and write common ideas on their A4 “Criteria for Successful Presentation”. I should have probably given them time to write features individually and then, discuss them in groups. Don’t know. Honestly, I am just not sure I have skills to make them work effectively in groups. Anyway, this remains my problem.
But judging by students answers they noticed some obvious and non-that-much obvious things in the presentation and when I asked guiding questions they could look more beyond the evident things. For instance, with Steve Jobs, we noticed that he repeats the things twice to make an impression (e.g. iPad was sold 15.mlj times…15.mlj times).
In addition, when students were asked to bring one presentation I asked how they looked for best practice and why they brought specifically this one presentation. Some of them said they typed ‘presentations’ in YouTube, others said ‘good presentations’ so we had a short talk which key words they can use to look for presentations. One student said she watched 15 presentations before she selected the example she brought. I also had a student who normally does very little during the lesson and he was the one who brought 5 presentations. I see it as a good sign. Many presentations came from TED.com, as I was referring to that website pretty often. For me it meant that they listen from time to time to the suggestions I giveJ
When discussion students’ examples, very often they repeated the same features we already had on our list (for instance, maintaining eye contact) so they had the chance to notice how important some of the features are.

Teacher’s role (what the teacher actually did and how)
I think the teacher was talking too much instead of organising learners’ activity. The teacher introduced the context for presentations (speaking), suggested the topic (speaking), gave learners the task to write down features of the presentation while watching it (finally, gave the task), was asking guiding questions (speaking again) and putting features on the blackboard (writing).
At the same time, during this sequence of lessons on environment, I was more or less satisfied with a variety of tasks offered to students, I did my best to offer students a variety if tasks and offer interesting tasks (group works, music, listening task, game, vocabulary tests). I can also say that I was not talking that much as usually which is an achievement.

3. Overall reflection on the lesson / task

Aim aspect (to what extent did we reach the aims?)

I do not think that the aims were reached, we only stepped on the way of reaching them. But I think there was one achievement – students got an idea of a successful presentation, we started developing criteria TOGETHER to evaluate their speech. Students started collecting features of successful presentation and the first groups of features appeared.
To be done:

• The groups are still not finalised and we’ll see what students produce by the next lesson;
• Features we came up with are not measurable (enough).
• The content aspect of the presentations was not touched fully so I am not sure the aim ‘use specific vocabulary’ will be achieved, in addition, I wonder what kind of content they will produce and how they will structure their ideas;
• The aim aspect of presentations was not touched. The context was given but what is the result they want to achieve as delegates from Latvia on UN Conference was not discussed, so this will be a weak point in their speeches. 

Tasks & materials aspect (how did we work on the tasks to reach the aim? Please make specific references to the steps of the thinking task framework)

We worked poorly on the tasks. I do not keep in mind aims and build the work towards achieving the aims. I see what I want from students but rather vaguely (find it difficult to think in terms of specific aims) and as a result have difficulties to organise work towards aim achievement.

Step 1. The challenge was probably there. I told students that I do not have criteria for assessing their presentations so we had to build these together. I found this ‘building together’ very useful. Taking in account students will get a mark for their presentations they were rather active in coming up with criteria.

Step 2 was very weakly present. I asked students how can we find the criteria. Some of them said, google ‘how to make a presentation’ and read the material. I asked for more ways and brought them to the answer I needed – watch successful presentations and learn from the examples. How to do it: list features of what you see.
Next, I do not think students clearly realised why we need to group features. So they probably did not need the ENV tool here so introducing grouping was artificial.

Step 3. Absent. The sequence of lesson will still continue.

Questions / conclusions for the future

• Any suggestions on how could I have organised students work with ‘finding features and grouping them’ better? How to show that ‘a list of features’ is not a good way? So far, I see that their presentations will show them we do not agree on a number of points I can give and they think they should get. 
• The main challenge now is to show that the criteria we came up with is not operationalised and lacks measurement aspect. Again, my brain tells me I have problems with planning work and organising students activity.