3 Steps to Ensure Success of Public PBL Presentations | E182
May 15, 2024Season 7Episode 182
Magnify Learning
Imagine walking into a room, your heart racing, palms sweaty, as you prepare to present a project that could define your academic or professional future. That's the scenario we tackle in our latest episode, armed with actionable strategies from a former Fortune 50 engineer to ensure your public Project-Based Learning presentations are not only successful but also a milestone in mastering public speaking. We share personal anecdotes and lessons learned to transform the anxious speaker into a confident orator, ready to take on college interviews and high-stakes business meetings with poise.
Our special focus is on the importance of practice presentations, with ample time for revision, to avoid those last-minute hiccups and 'what-ifs'. We know that communicating effectively can propel you further than technical skills alone, and we're here to guide your learners through the journey of becoming a standout speaker who can engage any audience, be it a classroom or a boardroom. Join us for an insightful discussion that could give you the competitive edge in your educational and professional endeavors.
Some of the links above are affiliate links which means we get a small commission on anything you purchase using that link (at no more cost to you). As Amazon Associates, we earn from qualifying purchases.
Imagine walking into a room, your heart racing, palms sweaty, as you prepare to present a project that could define your academic or professional future. That's the scenario we tackle in our latest episode, armed with actionable strategies from a former Fortune 50 engineer to ensure your public Project-Based Learning presentations are not only successful but also a milestone in mastering public speaking. We share personal anecdotes and lessons learned to transform the anxious speaker into a confident orator, ready to take on college interviews and high-stakes business meetings with poise.
Our special focus is on the importance of practice presentations, with ample time for revision, to avoid those last-minute hiccups and 'what-ifs'. We know that communicating effectively can propel you further than technical skills alone, and we're here to guide your learners through the journey of becoming a standout speaker who can engage any audience, be it a classroom or a boardroom. Join us for an insightful discussion that could give you the competitive edge in your educational and professional endeavors.
Some of the links above are affiliate links which means we get a small commission on anything you purchase using that link (at no more cost to you). As Amazon Associates, we earn from qualifying purchases.
Ryan Steuer:
Three steps to ensure success of your public PBL presentations. The first step you should take is you should go to whatispblcom to get free resources, whether you're a teacher or an administrator. That's whatispblcom. Now we're going to be taking thousands of educators through a workshop this summer to show them exactly how to create a PBL that has a public presentation. At the end, and as we're doing this process, we are going to give them a little bit more, but at least these three steps to ensure public PBL presentations go really, really well. Here's how you do it, because at the end of the day, your learners should not be scared of that COM 144 class, that beginning speech class that you have in college, or they shouldn't be ridiculously frightened at that interview that they have at their first job. I think when our learners are leaving our K-12 environment, they should be prepared to speak to adults. They should have a ton of experience talking to people that they don't know. They should have had a whole bunch of practice presentations, so that sure they did mess up, they failed, but they learned, and when they were failing it was in a safe environment. When we're talking about, failure is great, we're not talking about at that first interview, right. We're not talking about in speech class when you're at college. We're talking about when you're in a K-12 environment. You have these smaller fails that you can learn from and you get better at. So the ability to speak in front of an audience, I think it's one of the greatest gifts that you can give your learners.
Ryan Steuer:
When I was an engineer at a Fortune 50 company, I would say that my ability to well, probably problem solve as an engineer, but also then to talk to either people that I was showing new ideas, new technology to on the floor, or to be able to talk to my boss's boss In fact, I would say that my ability to talk to people in real time, whether they were a colleague or a boss's boss which, by the way, in a Fortune 50 company, it's a little intimidating, right? This is a person that has the Italian suit. This is the person that, in this particular case, would yell and have this really bright face. It was a little intimidating but really, honestly, he already knew the work that I could do. What he wanted to know is could I talk to people?
Ryan Steuer:
So, really, the two promotions that I got at that Fortune 50 company, both came from talking to my boss's boss about sports or about college. It wasn't about the engineering work that we were doing. I'd already shown that I was proficient in that. It was is this person going to be able to lead people? So we actually talked about a Purdue Ohio State game the first time and it lasted about I don't know, maybe five to seven minutes, and when we were done I was like I went to my boss and said so, did I do a good job or did I just flop that? I'm not really sure. Right, because I thought it would be longer. I thought he would ask me hard questions and I'd have big fancy answers and I would look great. But it was really a casual conversation that got me that promotion. My boss said no, you did a great job. He wants to know that you're a person. He's already seen your work.
Ryan Steuer:
So this ability to help our learners speak in front of an audience is huge. We know that public speaking is one thing that most people hate. So if they can love it and they can do well with it, it catapults them to the front of the line. So every PBL educator should know these three steps to ensure success of public PBL presentations. Number one is the practice presentation with time to revise. I once did a practice presentation with my learners the day before they presented and I didn't see it coming right. None of us did so. We went through. I gave them some critical feedback, things they needed to change, and they did not have time to change them. Here we are in the final presentations and I'm watching. I'm like didn't I already tell you guys that that didn't really work? And they're like yeah, but when were we going to change it, mr Stoyer? Ah, and the practice presentation was born right, the practice presentation plus days to revise. So you need at least one to two days so that they can revise practice again and be ready. Because you want them to be ready, you want it to be a celebration of their learning. You've taken a lot of their individual content. Grades have already been assessed. They really know what their grade is. Now we're celebrating it by sharing it with an outside audience, because the outside audience really cares about it. Now, that is a general practice presentation.
Ryan Steuer:
But what about those learners and maybe you're just at an earlier grade level where they haven't had a lot of experience, or maybe you're the first PBL classroom they come against? What do we do with our learners that have not had practice in speaking. Well, I've got another video and another podcast out here around master talk and I interviewed Brendan about this and he gave me this really great tool. It's called the random talk. So for one minute, you give a learner just a random thing to talk about for 60 seconds and you make it fun. You make it kind of silly. You say, all right, I want you to talk about a bicycle on the beach. You've got 60 seconds Ready, go. Well, I love bicycles on the beach because and they just start to learn in this environment again, where it's fun to fail. It's a minute, maybe even do 30 seconds to start right, but everybody's failing, right. You might even go first and have somebody give you something that's just crazy and you kind of stumble through it and it's like that's okay, that happens and you start to build. They start to build their confidence that they can talk about anything, they can take questions from community partners.
Ryan Steuer:
But we want to practice and have them be ready for their public presentations. In fact, that's the number one thing that will give you success in your public PBL presentations, and number two is that you have community partners that are there. You want community partners there. You want an authentic audience. If you're talking about genetic diseases, you want to have a nurse or a doctor, someone in the medical field, there. And now it doesn't have to solely be that, because even if you have the small business owner or somebody in insurance or Ryan's mom is there right it's still somebody that they don't necessarily know. It's not a teacher and it's not a learner, and that alone creates just enough tension to rise that bar a little bit higher and we try a little bit harder. The stakes are a little bit higher Because what happens is you're with them 184 days, which is really important. You've got relationship with every one of your learners and you love them. But they also know that if they do awful, you're going to forgive them and you're going to tell them to do a better job, but it's okay for them to really not even try. That's not the failure we want here.
Ryan Steuer:
I'll even give you this example. We were working with a school that we hadn't worked with before. It was down in Florida, and we said you know what, before we come down, why don't you send us your planning forms for your different PBL units? And okay, this looks great, looks pretty good. And they said, well, what's your biggest issue? And I said, well, we're going through the steps, but we're not getting the engagement that we thought we would get from our learners. So we look at all their project planning forms no-transcript, that's right. They weren't sharing their expertise, they weren't sharing what they knew with an outside group, you didn't have those community partners and you didn't get the energy, the engagement, the empowerment from those presentations.
Ryan Steuer:
So the second key to a successful public PBL presentations is to have different avenues of presentations. Now, this might look different depending on what grade level you are facilitating. If you have some younger learners, you might want to scaffold some of these a little bit more. If you've got some high school learners that have been in a PBL environment before, you might open up the floodgates a little bit and say how would you like to show me your expertise and mastery of these standards? Would you like to show me your expertise and mastery of these standards so they might use a Prezi, they might use Google Slides, they might. You might have some kind of a mock trial that they create or a play, that they come up with, a song. Whatever that piece is, you're going to have different avenues for them to showcase their expertise. And the variety is important because now you're putting your learners in a little bit different situation each time.
Ryan Steuer:
If you do an expo with a group of three every single time, they're going to get used to that. They're going to know that they're going to have to talk for about 30 seconds and then somebody else will pick it up and then the community partner is going to move on. You know, three to four minutes later. So you want to mix it up. So maybe you have an individual presentation right, Just like this. You put them on Zoom or you put them on Flipgrid or you put them in some kind of a recording piece just with themselves, and maybe they get to edit it right. So now they're gonna learn that they can edit things if it's gonna be asynchronous.
Ryan Steuer:
So you wanna vary those pieces so that your learners are developing skills in these different styles of presentation. And if you do those three things, you are going to have successful public PBL presentations. You're going to practice, present and give time for revision Really important. You can learn that one the hard way if you want, but I've already learned it for you. So don't do that. Have time for revision and tell your learners why you're putting that time in. Number two, you're going to bring community partners in, the more relevant the better, because you want them to give good feedback Not necessarily content feedback, but they can give presentation skill feedback for sure. And the third thing you want to do is you want to vary your presentation style, whether that's your end products or it's the actual presentation itself. And if you're doing those three things, then I guarantee you that you have successful PBL presentations. Keep watching these videos so you can get more tips. In fact, you can go to pblsimplifiedcom and get a whole series of these videos for teachers or for administrators.
Ryan Steuer:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the PBL Simplified Podcast. I appreciate you and honor that you tune in each week. Would you please take two minutes to leave a rating and a review? When you leave a review, it lets the next person know that this is a podcast worth listening to. When they go into their player and search, project-based learning and PBL Simplified popped up. When they see those reviews, they know that high-quality, visionary leaders are listening, so they tune in too and they can find their way into the PBL journey. Thank you so much for leaving a review. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate you.