Giving Feedback on a Presentation

Speech bubble by Alice Bartlett CC BY NC

How do you evaluate your Presentations?  I have struggled with finding meaning from student presentations especially if they aren’t very good.  How do you face public humiliation in the moment of knowing that what you presented was not up to par?  And why should this process of giving feedback only be up to the teacher?  I have worked with index cards, asking students to confer with peers and just asking for verbal feedback but often this becomes teacher directed and students choose very trivial focus points (eg. “They had good slides”) and it can be hard to bring out meaning to the group who are longing to get away from the front of the room.

So with this in mind, I scratched my head about how to move forward with Grade 7 Food Group presentations.  Students were given a Food Group and allocated into a Presentation team.  I then gave them 2 websites that had more than enough information on them and a set of questions or set information that I wanted them to find out about.  The main factor was that everyone had to be an expert on their selected Food Group, they had to collaborate to find the responses, not just allocated each person a set question to answer.  I then interviewed groups along the way to test out their expert knowledge.

We had just learned about using Google Presentations and having the functionality to share our presentation with our group and our teacher (wonderful!) so we could work on slides and have the teacher (yours truly) give pre-presentation feedback in the notes sections of the slides.  This was good for me as I could assist from outside of the classroom and offer feedback along the creation route.

I decided this time to be more organised about feedback after each presentation and stick to the new fave of mine Google Drive.  I decided to create Google forms (see form here) and to have students complete a form after every presentation.  I gave them set questions to respond to with set responses to choose from to ensure that they had to choose from the list to give them meaningful options but to really force and have no fence sitters, I had 4 options so you couldn’t choose the middle throw away option. This gave time for the new group who were prepping to get ready while holding the attention of the audience, and it made them reflect on more than they possibly may have from a Q&A session after each talk.  

The results have been so far really good.  The students have given really strong feedback and opted to leave extra bonus comments that are actually very close to the comments and notes that I took as a teacher on each presentation.

So, next lesson is coming.  I have collated the responses and have made the new spreadsheet ‘view only’ so that now each group can read what was offered to them.  I have already scanned through, but with my automated responses in place, it is hard to be offensive.  We will work to look at our strengths and weaknesses from the presentation and make some notes for future reference at the bottom of our presentation slides.  I hope that this will help them, and as they will have access to this document, they can continue to reference it as well.

The next step is to use a shared Google document to share our Food Group facts for a collaborative class set of notes on all food groups so that when we complete our food diaries next week, we can read about all of the food groups, vitamins and minerals, etc. and use the same information with sources and correctly CC images.

This has been a longer than usual process, but the results have been much better making the unit more meaningful on other levels not just about nutrition.